Christian Berndt

Geographies of circulation and exchange: constructions of markets

Although markets are at centre stage in capitalist processes of circulation and exchange, they have rarely been made an object of study. In this paper we distinguish three heterodox approaches. (1) Socioeconomics points out that concrete markets cannot be separated from their social context. Markets are dissolved in social networks and socialized. (2) Political economy investigates how the market model is confused for real markets by market participants. The market is represented as a destructive force. (3) Cultural economists point to the practical self-realization of economic knowledge and argue that the abstract market model is performative.

Geographies of markets: Materials, morals and monsters in motion

Approaching processes of capitalist market exchange from a cultural economic perspective, we identify three strands of research that are all part of a widespread ‘pragmatic turn’ in the study of economic activities: (1) the conceptualization of markets as heterogeneous arrangements of people, things and sociotechnical devices; (2) the insight that multiple frames of reference are mobilized in everyday market activities in addition to instrumental rationality; and (3) approaches that combine an interest in the performance of diversity and difference in concrete market contexts with an attention to mobility in network capitalism.

Performative regional (dis)integration: transnational markets, mobile commodities, and bordered North – South differences

Being implicated in an ambivalent play of both border crossing and drawing, global commodity chains are an ideal organizational field to analyze the fundamental paradox of global connectivity. Approaching the contingency of borders from a perspective informed by the performativity approach to markets, this paper starts from the assumption that this paradox is particularly salient in the context of commodity chains which connect the Global South with the Global North. Taking the example of one single agrocommodity, the tomato, and two border regions (Morocco – EU and Mexico – USA), we follow the links and heterogeneous associations which stretch from the border to the fields, supermarket shelves, and standardization agencies to migrant labor, quality-control apparatuses, and so forth. By reading commodity chains from their literal limits, that is, from the border and from the margins, we focus on an element of this global assemblage which is normally taken for granted and excluded from academic and public discourse.

Geographies of circulation and exchange III The great crisis and marketization ‘after markets’

This report is a plea for ‘geographies of marketization’, a perspective that rests on the assumption that a world ‘after markets’ will only emerge on the terrain of ‘markets’ themselves. To sustain this claim we speculate about the role of economics in the breakdown and stabilization of neoliberal marketization. In an attempt to re-establish their discipline at a time of crisis and a loss of faith in information-efficient markets, economists increasingly turn to behavioural economics. Starting with the observation that people do not act as neoclassical theory says they do, behaviouralism allows mainstream economics to keep the core foundational principles intact. With an assemblage of ‘reinforcement learning’ and well-timed ‘nudges’ the choice architects of libertarian paternalism once again try to conform individual behaviour to the assumptions of the neoclassical laboratory. In so doing neoliberalism may have entered a new stage we tentatively call ‘neoliberalism after markets’, an era where radical market orientation has not come to an end but where the belief in the forces of free markets is restabilized by a shift of regulation. Emphasis is moved from the context of regulation/deregulation of markets to regulating human behaviour through ‘technologies of calculation’ that render the self an effect of sociotechnically distributed rational action.

The Rescaling of Labour Regulation in Germany: From National and Regional Corporatism to Intrafirm Welfare?

This paper is concerned with recent changes in the way capital–labour relations are governed and regulated in German small and medium-sized enterprises. Drawing from institutionalist and regulationist approaches a geographical perspective is adopted which links processes across different sociospatial scales and stresses the importance of relative mobility differences in asymmetric power relations. By considering 28 individual case studies of firms in the Ruhr Area of Germany, it is argued: first, that as stakeholders in the firms respond to a changing environment and to increasing uncertainty, capital–labour relations in Germany are being downscaled and decentralised, profoundly changing the traditional power geometry between capital and labour; second, that the regulatory landscape is being ‘reworked’ in terms favourable to capital during a period in which the latter is in the ascendancy in the labour market; and, third, that there is a peculiar spatial dimension to the rearticulation of power relations and core institutions of the German model. As solidarity and trust appear to be increasingly produced and reproduced at the firm level in the emerging regulatory configuration, the scale of labour regulation is being recast.

Assembling Market B/Orders: Violence, Dispossession, and Economic Development in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Using an ongoing land conflict in Ciudad Juárez as a case study, I seek to show how maquiladora decision makers stabilize a regional development model even at times of extreme social and economic crisis. I argue that the current killings associated with drug trafficking play an ambivalent role in the reproduction of order in Juárez. At first sight, the violence is represented as a threat, unmasking as it does a regional development model as failure. Decision makers accordingly respond by doing everything possible to distance the maquiladora industry from the violence. On the one hand, this is being done by familiar means, not unlike in previous moments of crises. But on the other hand the events around Lomas del Poleo additionally assume a new quality, as maquiladorization goes hand in hand with an explicit strategy of spatial distanciation, integrating places and people that have hitherto been linked only marginally to the industry. And it is here that the narco-related violence plays different roles: As a convenient veil that allows what might be termed ‘ordinary’ assertions of brute force to be used under the cover of extraordinary, excessive, violence; and as a welcome excuse in moments of emergency that legitimize violent measures for the sake of a greater good.

The workplace at the millennium: new geographies of employment

Work, whatever its future, remains the central facet of existence for the vast majority of people around the globe. Scholarship to grasp the changing nature of work is thus fundamental to understanding the human condition. Yet the project to map contemporary geographies of employment is potentially a huge task. Our enquiries have to explore not only what is happening in the workplaceölooking at management practices, technological change, employee relations, and the likeöbut also what is happening beyond the world of the workplace. Understanding work requires knowledge of the wider economic, political, and cultural context in which employment takes place.The buoyancy of the economy is the key to determining the number and type of jobs that are available, but employment is also shaped by political regulations originating at international, national, and regional scales. The state (at every level) plays a key role, regulating the employment relation through legal measures such as controls over health and safety, employment rights (such as protection against unfair dismissal, rights to maternity and paternity leave, and limitations to working time), human rights (protection against race and sex discrimination), and rights to independent representation at work (trade union law). Moreover, government action over questions of training, education, childcare, unemployment, and management culture all impact on what employers and employees do in the workplace. Together, the state, employers, trade union organisations, and workers are all involved in crafting the ever-changing geography of employment. Taking a geographical perspective allows scholars to put employment in this wider context; focusing on the macrolevel environment as well as the microlevel dynamics of life at work. In addition, employment can be literally studied in place, in order to explore the role work plays in shaping community life, political expectations, and domestic relationships. Employment involves a relationship with an employer but it also invariably involves relationships with others, both those in the vicinity and those much further afield in other parts of the employing organisation. Studying the dynamics of employment thus also involves analysis of the interaction of social relations at different geographical scales, from the local to the global. Research into the geography of employment can tell us an enormous amount about economic, political, social, and cultural life. It is a field of enquiry that breaches the traditional boundaries of human geography, necessarily covering the changing nature of economic activity, the politics of employment regulation and relationships, the evolution of human societies and of their cultural forms. Strangely, however, it is a branch of human geographical enquiry with a relatively short history, coming to prominence only in the 1980s. At this time, many human geographers were trying to comprehend the nature of economic and social restructuring and change. Understanding employment change was a necessary by-product of the research into the decline of heavy industries and manufacturing, and the growth of services and the financial industry in `Western economies during the 1980s (see Bluestone and Harrison, 1982; Frobel et al, 1980; Martin and Rowthorn, 1986; Massey, 1995; Massey and Meegan, 1979). At this time, the nature of employment was being recast and the geography of employment was being remapped and reconfigured. Not only were new types of jobs being created in new places (such as industrial districts, high-tech corridors, and export processing zones) but the old jobs were also being recast through new management practices such as Guest editorial Environment and Planning A 2000, volume 32, pages 1523 ^ 1528

Neoliberal austerity and the marketisation of elderly care

Taking the recent debate on austerity as a starting point, this paper discusses contradictions in current processes of neoliberalisation using the marketisation of elderly care in Switzerland as an example. Just as in other countries, an austerity rationality in public spending and the neoliberal restructuring of public health services paved the way for the emergence of private suppliers of 24 hours home care. These new agencies hire migrant women from Eastern European countries and sell packaged care services to the elderly. In so doing, they play a key role in reconfiguring care according to a market logic. They shape the working conditions of live-in migrant care workers and the definition of care itself as a marketable good. In our paper, we analyse the strategies of these new corporate intermediaries based on a market analysis and on interviews with their representatives. We argue that the marketisation of elderly care in Switzerland is illustrative of todays neoliberalism in that it combines progressive and regressive aspects and owes its emergence to its ambiguous entanglement with many other discourses. The paper illustrates how the transformation of the home into a new space of commercialised care relies on the production and economic valorisation of social and mobility differentials.

Uneven development, commodity chains and the agrarian question

There has been a long overdue revival of interest recently amongst economic and development geographersin questions of geographical uneven development. On the one hand, this can be seen as a reaction to thepositive emphasis during the 1990s on the inclusion of firms, workers and regions in global value chains andproduction networks. On the other hand, there has been a growing awareness of the continuing importanceof agriculture and the question of agrarian change, not least after the development industry had rediscoveredsmallholders and peasants as targets of market-driven policy interventions. It is at the conjuncture of thesedevelopments that this virtual issue is situated, tracing these debates in Progress in Human Geography from thelate 1970s until today. The 13 articles selected for this virtual issue illustrate that the journal provided anintellectual home to key contributions to this debate. This introduction provides an overview of key themesemerging from the articles and highlights their main scholarly contributions.

Märkte in Entwicklung

Erst im voraussetzungsvollen praktischen Vollzug erfahren Markte ihre temporare Stabilisierung. Markte mussen entwickelt werden und mit Blick auf den Globalen Suden verdoppelt sich dieser Entwicklungsaufwand: Entwicklung vollzieht sich durch die Entwicklung von Markten. So zumindest lautet das herrschende Paradigma neoliberaler politischer Rationalitat. Am empirischen Beispiel ostafrikanischer Agrarmarkte zeigen wir wie Entwicklungsinterventionen Markte als sozio-technische Agencements rahmen. Dabei werden kalkulierende Akteure und Apparaturen hervorgebracht und in distribuierten Handlungskonstellationen Markte subtil normalisiert und nicht-marktformige Okonomien als deviant und hilfsbedurftig konstruiert.