Craig Young

'Seed to shelf', 'teat to table', 'barley to beer' and 'womb to tomb': discourses of food quality and quality assurance schemes in the UK.

Abstract In the current restructuring of agro-food systems quality is seen as increasingly important and in the United Kingdom this is evidenced by the growth in quality assurance schemes (QAS). The aim of this paper is to critically examine the process of introducing quality through QAS in the UK. This is done by identifying and analysing the key discourses in the farming and food industries surrounding this process. Drawing on Farmers Weekly as a data source, four main discourses are identified and analysed. These are discourses of organisational change within the agro-food chain; discourses surrounding the definition of quality; discourses of farmer acceptance of, and resistance to, QAS; and discourses which construct a particular representation of consumers. The implications of each of these discourses for the development of QAS are also discussed and key issues for further research identified.

Mundane mobilities, banal travels

All of us are caught up in banal or mundane mobilities, whether it is the walk to the bus stop and catching the bus to town, the daily commute by train to work, the trip by car to the supermarket, the cycle ride to school or the holiday visit to a tourist attraction. What makes these everyday voyages mundane is their commonplace and regular occurrence, so they are not generally conceived as extraordinary or special trips through time and space but are enmeshed with the familiar worlds we inhabit, constituting part of the unreflexive, habitual practice of everyday life. We believe that this focus upon the banal or mundane dimensions of mobility is timely with regard to recent claims that have been made about the expansion of mobilities through technological and social developments and the ways in which people increasingly coordinate their activities in new and complicated ways under conditions of accelerating and expanding journeys through space and time. This ‘mobility turn’ or ‘new mobilities paradigm’ has appositely identified the flows which make up the spatial and social complexity of the expanding, variegated relationships between people and places and critiqued static, bounded conceptions of place, space and belonging. While we welcome their timely critique of geographical sedentarism, Sheller and Urry somewhat hyperbolically claim that ‘all the world seems to be on the move’ despite the fact that movement has always been endemic to social life. They exemplify their claim by identifying the large-scale travel of the likes of tourists, migrants and business people, implying that contemporary mobility is distinctive by virtue of its trans-national characteristics (Sheller and Urry 2006: 207). Yet while they warn against the hyperbolic tendencies that overstress disembedding and deterritorialization processes without acknowledging the ways in which ‘all mobilities entail specific, often highly embedded and immobile infrastructures’ (2006: 210), the examples they discuss tend to focus upon the spatially extensive movements across the planet rather Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 2007

Place, national identity and post-socialist transformations: an introduction

Abstract This paper serves as an introduction to this theme issue on the topic of post-socialist identity politics surrounding nation building, national identity and nationalism. It presents an overview of the key processes of post-socialist identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) in order to contextualise this collection of papers. This introduction outlines the key processes of identity formation and the treatment of nationalism under conditions of state-socialism, and then identifies the main processes of identity formation which have emerged in discourses surrounding nations and nationalities in post-socialist CEE and the FSU. A short account of each of the papers in the theme issue is then presented to identify the common strands of their analyses of post-socialist nationalisms.

The Migration Dynamics of the “Creative Class”: Evidence from a Study of Artists in Stockholm, Sweden

This article focuses on a neglected issue in debates about the “creative city,” the migration dynamics of the so-called creative class. The work of Richard Florida on the importance of the “creative class” for urban development continues to influence urban policymakers worldwide, despite the lack of empirical evidence supporting the key assumptions made about the migration dynamics of those in apparently “creative” occupations. This article evaluates the usefulness of adopting the approach of analyzing the migration dynamics of one “creative” occupation, artists. We consider the migration experiences of a group of artists who have moved to Stockholm, Sweden, exploring their mobility and their motivations for moving, the factors influencing their choice of location, and the influence of their occupational dynamics on their mobility. The analysis advances earlier studies of creative migration by considering the impact on their mobility of life-cycle effects and their reliance on professional networks and queries the purported link between openness and tolerance in cities with low entry barriers for those in “creative” occupations.

European Union enlargement, post-accession migration and imaginative geographies of the ‘New Europe’: media discourses in Romania and the United Kingdom

This paper is concerned with re-imaginings of ‘Europe’ following the accession to the European Union (EU) of former ‘Eastern European’ countries. In particular it explores media representations of post-EU accession migration from Romania to the United Kingdom in the UK and Romanian newspaper press. Todorovas (1997) notion of Balkanism is deployed as a theoretical construct to facilitate the analysis of these representations as first, the continuation of long-standing and deeply embedded imaginings of the ‘East’ of Europe and, second, as a means of contesting these discourses. The paper explores the way in which the UK press construct Balkanist discourses about Romania and Romanian migrants, and then analyses how the Romanian press has contested such discourses. The paper argues that the idea of the ‘East’ remains important in constructing notions of ‘Europe’ within popular media geographies.

Habit, Memory, and the Persistence of Socialist-Era Street Names in Postsocialist Bucharest, Romania

The critical study of toponymy has paid considerable attention to the renaming of urban places following revolutionary political change. Such renaming is intended to institutionalize a new political agenda through shaping the meanings in everyday practices and landscapes. Renaming, however, might not always be successful, and this article examines this issue with reference to a market in Bucharest, Romania. Originally named Piaţa Moghioroş during the socialist era to commemorate a leading Communist Party activist, the market was renamed in the postsocialist period. Yet, more than two decades on, the original name remains in widespread everyday use. Using a mixed-method approach, we seek to advance the critical toponymies literature by exploring the persistence of the socialist-era name within everyday practice. Although many authors have highlighted the issue of popular resistance to an unpopular renaming, we find little evidence of conscious resistance, and instead we explore the importance of habit within everyday practices as an explanation, drawing on an understanding of habit derived from sociocognitive psychology. This perspective proposes that habits are stable and hard to break if the broader context in which they are situated is stable. We suggest that this explanation, rather than popular contestation, has more to offer in understanding the persistence of the toponym Piaţa Moghioroş. We thus highlight the importance of considering how the “users” of place names react to the changes of such names and create their own meanings in relation to them in ways unintended by elites.

Political Identity, Public Memory and Urban Space: A Case Study of Parcul Carol I , Bucharest from 1906 to the Present

Abstract This article analyses the inter-relationship between political identity, public memory and urban space in South-east Europe through a case study of Parcul Carol I (Carol I Park) in Bucharest, Romania from 1906 to the present. The article analyses how the urban cultural landscape has been reshaped to support the political ambitions of three successive regimes—Romania as a kingdom and liberal constitutional monarchy (1881–1938); state-socialist Romania (1947–1989); and the post-socialist Romanian state from 1989. The article highlights complex continuity from the state-socialist period under post-socialism, rather than destruction of the landscape of state-socialism, combined with the return of pre-socialist landscape elements. The article argues for the need for studies of the fate of state-socialist urban landscapes under post-socialism which consider the complexities introduced by the persistence of landscape elements from the pre-socialist and state-socialist periods and their combination with pre-socialist and post-socialist landscapes to produce hybrid memory-scapes and spaces of the nation.

Meeting the New Foreign Direct Investment Challenge in East and Central Europe: Place-Marketing Strategies in Hungary:

The attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) has become a major economic development goal of the postsocialist countries of East and Central Europe (ECE). ECE countries have rapidly adopted ‘Western’-style place-marketing policies to attract FDI. However, little is known about place marketing under postsocialism, and particularly in the context of an enlarged European Union; hence the author presents an analysis of the supply-side policies which Hungary has developed in response to its rapidly changing position with regard to FDI. In particular, he examines the strategies developed by two key agencies responsible for attracting inward investment, the Ministry of Economy and Transport and the Hungarian Investment and Trade Development Agency. Hungarys current position in respect to patterns of attracting FDI is evaluated and, through outlining the key changes in the nature of FDI, a set of key issues which must be addressed in any place-marketing strategy in ECE is developed. The author then analyses how these two key agencies have responded to this new FDI context. The author assesses how Hungary has been able to address the new FDI context and also considers how FDI and attempts to attract it is reshaping supply-side policies, and postsocialist states themselves.

Neoliberal Doctrine Meets the Eastern Bloc: Resistance, Appropriation and Purification in Post-Socialist Spaces

THIS COLLECTION EXPLORES HOW NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY—and related economic policies— have been implemented in the once-socialist countries of East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Specifically, it argues that this ideology undergoes deep modifications as it meets post-socialist conditions: sometimes it is creatively appropriated, sometimes resisted and sometimes ‘purified’ (in that it is implemented more thoroughly than in the Western nations where neoliberalism as an ideology was developed). Thus, the collection illustrates how ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, to use Brenner and Theodore’s (2002) terminology, occurs ‘on the ground’. It argues that the ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’, which have developed in a variety of post-socialist contexts, can differ profoundly from the theoretical constructs propagated by neoliberalism’s supporters, including the major international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As recent literature on policy mobility makes clear ‘It is already widely recognized that it is rarely possible to transfer policies directly, precisely because they emerge from and are responses to particular “local” sets of social and political conditions which are not replicated in the places to which they are transplanted’ (Cochrane & Ward 2012, p. 5). Neoliberalism comprises the policy applications of neoclassical economic theory. Academic critiques such as that of Harvey (2003, 2005) highlight the connections between these policies, the reinstatement of class power and the emergence of the current phase of globalisation. The narrative of Harvey and others describes a revival of neoclassical ideology in the US and the UK in the midst of the 1970s crisis of the Fordist mode of production and the Keynesian political economy model (Lipietz 2001; Harvey 2010). In the 1980s, arguably in reaction to this crisis, the Reagan administration in the US and the Thatcher government in the UK adopted policies that curtailed welfare programmes and other redistributive policies; lifted

Financing the Micro-Scale Enterprise: Rural Craft Producers in Scotland, 1840–1914

The micro-scale businesses of independent craft producers have received little attention from historians. This article examines the links between the financing and use of capital by these businesses, and the ambiguous social position of the petit bourgeois business owners. A quantitative examination of the relative importance of the various sources of finance for these firms is assessed in the context of the generally accepted picture of financing for British industry, revealing differences in the pattern of funding for micro-scale enterprises. The ambiguous social relationships between the micro-scale business owners and the larger bourgeoisie, and with the working class, are partly explained by the underlying economic relationships. In particular the supply of trade credit by larger firms, and the use of credit and infrequent wage payments in their relationships with the working class, are identified as important elements.