Al James

Researching hybrid ‘economic’/‘development’ geographies in practice Methodological reflections from a collaborative project on India’s new service economy

In an increasingly globalized world, the long-standing intellectual division of labour between ‘economic’ geographers and ‘development’ scholars is becoming less tenable. This paper explores some of the practical implications and synergistic outcomes of developing a hybrid economic/development geography ‘trading zone’. Drawing on experiences from our collaborative research on India’s new service economy, we reflect on: our intellectual journey through this project from relatively conventional subdisciplinary start points; how we were forced to rethink those start points at each stage of the research project; and the wider implications of these experiences for contemporary debates on internal interdisciplinarity within human geography.

Regendering care in the aftermath of recession

Against a backdrop of persistent gender inequalities around childcare, recent research suggests that some men – and especially fathers – are engaging to a greater extent in the everyday tasks of social reproduction. However, our understanding of the multiple factors, motivations and institutions that facilitate and constrain this nuanced ‘regendering of care’ phenomenon in different national contexts remains limited. Previous work has theorized the uneven rise of male primary caregiving in North America and Scandinavia. This article extends these debates through an empirical focus on the United Kingdom in the wake of the 2008–09 recession and double dip of 2011–12, to explore male work-care in relation to economic restructuring, welfare spending cuts, rising costs of childcare, policy interventions which seek to culturally and numerically defeminize care work, and concerns over work–life balance in an ‘age of austerity’. The final part of the article explains the significance of a larger research agenda that recentres the expansive work–life balance literature through an expanded focus of analysis on men, work-care intermediaries and socially sustainable modes of post-recessionary growth.

Men at Work? Debating Shifting Gender Divisions of Care.

In response to four commentaries on our paper ‘Regendering care in the aftermath of recession?’, we extend our discussion of the ongoing knowledge gap that prevails around shifting patterns of male work/care. Recognizing the spatial limits of extant theories of male primary caregiving, we discuss first the need to attend to the variegated landscapes of male caregiving across the globe. Likewise, the theoretical stakes of expanding the focus of ‘mainstream’ analysis to take account of the situated experiences and knowledges of men and women in countries of the global South. We then consider the subjects of our research inquiry (the ‘who’ of contemporary fathering) and how different definitions of male primary caregivers may reveal or conceal patterns and shifts in male caregiving practices. Lastly we consider questions of scale and research methodology. Although our paper employs a national-level analysis, we fully endorse the use of alternative scalar lenses and underline the need to analyse male care within the context of multiscalar and interacting sites of normative change: from nation state, to community, to home, to the body.

Sustaining Economic Geography? Business and Management Schools and the UK’s Great Economic Geography Diaspora

This Exchanges commentary is concerned with the health of Economic Geography as a sub-discipline, and economic geography (as a wider community of practice) in one of its historical heartlands, the UK. Against a backdrop of prior achievement, recent years have witnessed a noticeable migration of economic geographers in the UK from Departments of Geography to academic positions in Business and Management Schools and related research centres. For the first time, a new (2018) research report by the Economic Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG – We’re In Business! Sustaining Economic Geography? – has empirically evidenced this trend since 2000 (see supplementary material). In this parallel commentary, we summarise the major findings of that project in order to identify: the scale of this cross-disciplinary labour mobility; its operation at different levels of the academic career hierarchy; and the underlying motivations and variegated outcomes experienced by those making the transition. We then move to consider the wider implications of this ‘Economic Geography Diaspora’ for sustaining Economic Geography teaching, research and knowledge production. While economic geography clearly has a healthy appeal to Business and Management as an interdisciplinary community of practice, we raise multiple concerns around the largely uni-directional nature of this ‘movers’ phenomenon in UK universities. We make a number of suggestions for possible interventions to effect positive change and to prompt a larger conversation that benchmarks this UK experience against other national contexts.

The Economic Geography of Innovation: Theorizing the gendered institutional bases of innovative regional economies

Introduction During the past two decades, scholars and policymakers have debated how best to promote and harness innovation in regional economies. Much of the resulting regional literature focuses on creating conditions conducive to knowledge creation, information dissemination, entrepreneurship, and learning. However, although this literature extensively documents the formal interactions that underpin innovative regional economies, it is less satisfying in its treatment of the informal socioinstitutional bases. Critically, we still do not fully understand how distinctive patterns of social relations reinforce more formal interactions within these regions, and hence how they contribute to economic performance. Although many analysts typically suggest something intangible that permits innovation to proceed in some places but not in others, they often fail to specify the exact nature of the processes through which key sociorelational structures promote innovative activity more successfully in some regions than in others. One major component of this problem is a dominant tendency within the regional learning and innovation literature to treat elite workers as an homogeneous group with little differentiation across gender, race, or cultural background. Although scholars argue that collective learning and innovation processes are enhanced by a shared social environment that supports interaction (e.g. Lorenz 1992; Keeble and Wilkinson 1999), this shared social environment is too often conceptualized as implicitly masculine, and hence distinctive patterns of female work and social interaction are sidelined.

Working at the margins? Muslim middle class professionals in India and the limits of ‘labour agency’

This paper explores the work-lives of middle class Muslim professionals in Indias new service economy. While these workers have successfully negotiated labour market entry into the ‘core’ growth sectors of Indias globalising economy, they are simultaneously subject to different forms of social, cultural and political marginalisation. Strikingly, they also remain at the margins of both economic geography and development geography scholarship. The paper extends a growing development geography/economic geography ‘intellectual trading zone’ and enhances understandings of the complex relationships between labour agency, marginality and social inclusion. The paper draws on new survey data to document patterns of labour agency amongst Muslim professionals in New Delhi. This is augmented by interviews with Muslim professionals to show how different forms of marginality are experienced in their everyday work-lives and the strategies and agencies articulated towards (re)working those marginalities. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of these findings in relation to socially inclusive growth, the middle-class transformation of Indias Muslims and wider understandings of marginality and worker agency.