{"title":"Embeddedness beyond the lead firm in global production networks: Insights from Kenyan horticulture","authors":"Aarti Krishnan","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231170194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231170194","url":null,"abstract":"Recent research on embeddedness in global production networks (GPNs) has begun to move beyond the dominant perspective on how lead firms embed into host countries to investigate how non-lead firms embed across multiple scales in a GPN. This paper builds on such work by examining both processes of how, and the extent to which, different Southern suppliers embed into GPNs, detailing the contestation, struggles, and synergies faced. Empirical evidence is provided through a case study of Kenyan horticulture. Using a mixed-method approach of interviews and surveys, the paper finds that Kenyan farmers and Kenyan export firms (KEFs) have varied ways in which they embed, with farmers more embedded (highly dependent on network relationships and participation in a GPN) and KEFs simultaneously less embedded (having a low degree of commitment towards farmers) in GPNs. Overarchingly, the results demonstrate the need to account for the complex ways in which non-lead firm actors like Southern suppliers embed in GPNs.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72514886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alone and lonely. The economic cost of solitude for regions in Europe","authors":"C. Burlina, A. Rodríguez‐Pose","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231169286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231169286","url":null,"abstract":"Solitude is a rising phenomenon in the western world. The share of people affected by solitude has been rising for some time and the Covid-19 pandemic has further brought this trend to the fore. Yet, we know next to nothing about the aggregate subnational economic impact of the rise in solitude. In this paper, we analyse the consequences of solitude on regional economic performance across Europe, distinguishing between two of its key dimensions: alone living, proxied by the regional share of single-person households and loneliness, proxied by the aggregate share of social interactions. We find that solitude has important implications for economic development, but that these go in different directions. While alone living is a substantial driver of economic growth across European regions, high shares of lonely people undermine it. The connection of loneliness with economic growth is, however, dependent on the frequency of in-person meetings, with large shares of the population meeting others socially on a weekly basis, alongside a small percentage of people who never meet others, yielding the best economic returns.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78401079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking Polanyi's double movement through participatory justice: Land use planning in Puerto Rico","authors":"Hannah Stokes-Ramos","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231170190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231170190","url":null,"abstract":"Puerto Rico has lost an alarming amount of farmland in the past century, and land distribution is highly unequal in line with broader social patterns. These problems raise the question of alternative models that can enhance socio-ecological justice, and whether the reversal of the historical neglect of agriculture could factor significantly into such alternatives. A significant step toward such a reversal was arguably Puerto Rico's 2015 Plan de Uso de Terrenos (Land Use Plan) (PUT), the first island-level land use plan. I analyze the PUT as a Polanyian double movement to protect agricultural land from circulating as an urban asset, with the novel addition of environmental justice's “trivalent” notion of social justice. I argue that participatory justice, in particular, played a dual role in this “double movement”: first, the process achieved sufficient balance amongst actors to protect significant agricultural area from urban development; and second, the constituency mobilized through the PUT's creation later proved essential to the plan's defence against land marketization efforts. My analysis offers a unique synthesis of environmental justice and heterodox political economy and concludes that deepening dialogue across the two literatures can offer important insights for achieving emancipatory socio-ecological change in land use planning.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88229611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The American spirit: The performativity of folk economics in global financial markets","authors":"E. Tarim, A. Gozluklu, G. Muradoglu","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231169738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231169738","url":null,"abstract":"Inspired by Austin's conceptualisation of utterances as performative, that is, they do things rather than merely represent, research has shown how scientific theories can become performative in financial markets. Research also shows that brokerage and investment work is as much about using everyday knowledge of markets as it is about performing scientific theories. We investigate whether and how this knowledge or what Swedberg calls ‘folk economics’ can also be performative. We focus on Borsa Istanbul, an emerging market where market actors perform what we call ‘the American Spirit’ – a ubiquitous folk theory that frames and plots the Turkish market as one that moves in tandem with American and other developed markets – and in the process become better market forecasters. Our findings have implications for the study of folk economics and performativity in global economy and finance.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78423421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"State, capitalism and infrastructure-led development: A multi-scalar analysis of the Belgrade-Budapest railway construction","authors":"Linda Szabó, Csaba Jelinek","doi":"10.1177/0308518X231156171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231156171","url":null,"abstract":"The 2008 financial crisis allowed for the rising power of China to expand deeper into more (semi-)peripheral regions: in the past decade, the role of China and Chinese SOEs has increased markedly in Eastern Europe. This has been in step with China's geopolitical and geoeconomic expansion, hallmarked by the Belt and Road Initiative; the reconstruction of the Belgrade-Budapest railway line constitutes one of its flagship projects in Europe. This paper aims to explore the complexities of the current reconfiguration of state-capital nexus through an empirical analysis of this particular development project; in doing so, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate about the heuristic use of ‘new’ state capitalism in three specific ways. First, instead of conceptualizing the state as a territorially confined power container, we propose to scrutinize the state-capital nexus from a multi-scalar and relational perspective. Second, we claim that the study of funding, financing and governing of large-scale infrastructural investments is a fruitful analytical entry point to theorize the changing relations between ‘state’ and ‘capital’. Finally, we argue that from the perspective of contemporary shifts in global power structures, the emergence of state capitalist modalities in the Eastern peripheries of Europe should be understood as a ‘co-production’ of the geopolitical rivalry and elite capture of domains of infrastructure. In terms of methodology, in order to show how state-capital relations are produced, enacted and redrawn, the study builds on the analysis of media sources, policy documents, company networks, semi-structured interviews, and non-participant observations.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"35 1","pages":"1281 - 1304"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73368289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Where is the world in the new state capitalism?","authors":"Jennifer Bair","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231160543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231160543","url":null,"abstract":"Alami and Dixon instead treat state capitalism not as a well-defined analytical category but rather a \"flexible means of problematising...trajectories of state intervention and the role that it plays in the (geo) political re-organisation of global capitalism\" ([1]: xx). One way this query might be posed is where in the world the phenomena described under the rubric of state capitalism are most pronounced or perhaps newly apparent;in which countries or in what parts of the world do we see a more muscular or interventionist state? Keywords: State capitalism;hegemonic cycles;macrohistorical sociology EN State capitalism hegemonic cycles macrohistorical sociology 770 773 4 05/16/23 20230501 NES 230501 The term \"state capitalism\" dates from the late nineteenth century, when it was coined by Marxists seeking to understand the growing role of the state as an owner of capital and orchestrator of production in European countries. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of Environment & Planning A is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"23 1","pages":"770 - 773"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75041513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Small businesses and government assistance during COVID-19: Evidence from the paycheck protection program in the U.S.","authors":"Qingfang Wang, Wei Kang","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231166407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231166407","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented losses for small businesses in cities across the globe. Policymakers have relied on a wide range of measures to support firms and sustain business continuity. However, significant concerns have been expressed about the degree of equity in the distribution and efficiency of government assistance during the pandemic disruption. Drawing on the case of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and its implementation in inland Southern California, this study examines the spatial distribution of PPP loans at the neighborhood level. Based on spatial regressions and in-depth interviews with small businesses, banks, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, the study finds that, in terms of their total number and value, the PPP loans have roughly succeeded in reaching their small business targets. However, communities with higher shares of pandemic-vulnerable businesses or higher levels of socioeconomic vulnerability are less likely to have received PPP loans. There have also been spatial spillover effects of community vulnerability when it comes to receiving PPP loans at the neighborhood level. The correlation between fewer PPP loans and community vulnerability also reflects both short-term needs and longstanding challenges facing entrepreneurship and business development in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Moreover, small business resilience and community resilience are inseparable, and thus government business assistance must be considered in the context of local communities.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81294814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Critical approaches to rentiership","authors":"K. Birch, Callum Ward","doi":"10.1177/0308518X231162363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231162363","url":null,"abstract":"The provocation of this special issue is that contemporary capitalism is different. It is increasingly dominated by rentiership rather than entrepreneurship: that is, the extraction of economic rents from the ownership and/or control of assets and resources, rather than profits resulting from the production and sale of new goods and services. We understand economic rents as the value exacted or extracted from the socio-natural world as a result of the relations of ownership and control of particular assets or resources, primarily because of their constructed degree of scarcity or quality (see Birch, 2017, 2020; Birch and Ward, 2022; Christophers, 2020; Haila, 2016; Standing, 2016; Ward and Aalbers, 2016; Zeller, 2008). The concept of rentiership adds to a geographical analysis by specifying the socio-economic power imbalances, strategies, and processes driving wealth extraction and concentration. We circulated the call for papers in mid-2018 when unease with the prevalence of rent-seeking in contemporary capitalism appeared to be coming to a head (Mulgan, 2013; Piketty, 2014; Sayer, 2015; Standing, 2016; Stiglitz, 2012). While papers have been available online since as early as 2019, the final special issue itself has been delayed as a result of the pandemic and associated time pressures on authors. In that period, the characterization of contemporary capitalism as “rentier,” in the sense of being dominated by assets and their owners (Christophers, 2019, 2020; Mazzucato, 2018), has become almost commonplace (e.g. Wolf, 2019). This has extended beyond academia; for example, the 2020–2025 Strategic Plan of major Canadian think tank the Centre for International Governance Innovation highlights the need for “research and analysis surrounding how different competition frameworks could lead to changes in market power and the distribution of rents.” Similar concerns with the problems associated with rentiership are evident in major NGOs (e.g. Jacobs, 2015), the United Nations (e.g. UNCTAD, 2017), and even the World Economic Forum.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"34 1","pages":"1429 - 1437"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89294896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reorienting new state capitalism to food and agriculture","authors":"Marion Werner","doi":"10.1177/0308518X231157749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231157749","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship on global agri-food regulation would contribute much to new state capitalism debates, which to date largely ignore this field. Contradictions within the global arrangement of corporations, international agencies, national governments and trade architecture governing agriculture in the 1990s set the stage for more robust state roles post-2008. Food price volatility catalyzed neomercantilist policies while, paradoxically, deepening global market relations. States' on-going interventions to manage repriced food offer crucial windows into this paradox of new state capitalism, while centering socioecological dimensions that remain peripheral to new state capitalism debates.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"18 1","pages":"782 - 787"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81568053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sarah Hall, A. Leaver, Leonard Seabrooke, D. Tischer
{"title":"The changing spatial arrangements of global finance: Financial, social and legal infrastructures","authors":"Sarah Hall, A. Leaver, Leonard Seabrooke, D. Tischer","doi":"10.1177/0308518X231159396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231159396","url":null,"abstract":"The spatial arrangements of global finance have changed significantly over the last 30 years, entangling new actors, relations and sites. Infrastructures have developed to stabilize change and complexity. The collection advocates for a broader understanding of infrastructures that includes – but moves beyond – supporting technologies of Bloomberg terminals, telephony, and high-speed cabling. In particular, it highlights other infrastructural forms: financial institutions which govern and steer market action, social networks which organize financial practices and reproduce status-based power asymmetries and legal treatments which work across jurisdictions to open up opportunities for actors to innovate or avoid costs. This theme issue highlights how these different infrastructural forms support both changes and continuities in the global financial system and thus contributes to the literature on financialization, global financial networks and global wealth chains.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"92 1","pages":"923 - 930"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74089956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}