James T. Murphy

Socio-technical regimes and sustainability transitions Insights from political ecology

Sustainability is increasingly becoming a core focus of geography, linking subfields such as urban, economic, and political ecology, yet strategies for achieving this goal remain illusive. Socio-technical transition theorists have made important contributions to our knowledge of the challenges and possibilities for achieving more sustainable societies, but this body of work generally lacks consideration of the influences of geography and power relations as forces shaping sustainability initiatives in practice. This paper assesses the significance for geographers interested in understanding the space, time, and scalar characteristics of sustainable development of one major strand of socio-technical transition theory, the multi-level perspective on socio-technical regime transitions. We describe the socio-technical transition approach, identify four major limitations facing it, show how insights from geographers – particularly political ecologists – can help address these challenges, and briefly examine a case study (GMO and food production) showing how a refined transition framework can improve our understanding of the social, political, and spatial dynamics that shape the prospects for more just and environmentally sustainable forms of development.

Theorizing practice in economic geography: Foundations, challenges, and possibilities:

Over the last decade or so there has been an identifiable shift in the interests of many economic geographers towards a concern with practices: stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions that constitute and reproduce economic space, and through and within which socioeconomic actors and communities embed knowledge, organize production activities, and interpret and derive meaning from the world. Although this shift has gained significant momentum its general theoretical significance remains somewhat unclear and the concept is vulnerable to criticisms that it is incoherent, too ‘micro-scale’ in emphasis, unable to provide valid links between everyday practices and higher-order phenomena (eg, institutions, class structures), and that, in some cases, it lacks a sound political economy. This paper argues that while it undoubtedly has limitations, the practice-oriented shift represents an ongoing development of a longstanding and heterodox field of social scientific interest from both within and beyond the subdiscipline. We first highlight the diverse strands of economic geography scholarship that have an explicit interest in practices and then propose an epistemological and methodological framework for a practice-oriented economic geography. The framework is based on the polemical argument that insight from both critical realist and actor-network perspectives can provide the basis to better demarcate practices in relation to their social and spatiotemporal dimensions. It goes on to outline a reformulated retroductive methodology to assess the impacts and theoretical significance of particular economic-geographical practices. The paper concludes that practice offers a potentially powerful, yet complementary, epistemological tool that can create conceptual space for the study of a wide range of socioeconomic and geographical phenomena.

Building Trust in Economic Space

While there is widespread recognition of the importance and role of trust in facilitating regional development, technology transfer, and agglomeration economies, the concept remains rather undertheorized within economic geography and regional science. This paper reviews and assesses the literature on the role and constitution of trust for economic and industrial development and presents a conceptualization of the trust building process that accounts for the influences of agency, institutions, materials, and interpersonal expression. In doing so, geographic concerns about the role of space and context are linked to economic and sociological conceptualizations of trust and to scholarship from actor-network theory (ANT) and social psychology regarding the influence of power, non-human intermediaries, and performance on social outcomes and network configurations. The result is a heuristic framework for analyzing trust-building processes as temporally and spatially situated social phenomena shaped by context-specific subjective, intersubjective, and structural factors. The conceptualization’s broader significance lies not in detailing the many factors that influence trust but in its contextualization of the micro-social processes that can strengthen business relationships. In doing so, the framework can facilitate a move beyond solely instrumental conceptualizations of trust and toward a relational understanding of how the means for establishing and sustaining trust influence the development and potential of such ‘ends’ as clusters and production networks.

Networks, Trust, and Innovation in Tanzania's Manufacturing Sector

Abstract The social dimensions of innovation are examined for a group of manufacturers in Mwanza, Tanzania. Social networks of businesspeople in Mwanza are found to support innovation in manufacturing firms. Trust in these relations is especially important as it improves the quality of information exchanges and encourages the development of strong intracommunity ties and weak intercommunity relations. A typology of manufacturers demonstrates how different social strategies relate to innovation. The findings suggest that openness to social relations enhances innovation but that weak formal institutions discourage manufacturers from extending their social relations beyond core networks.

Emerging themes in economic geography: outcomes of the Economic Geography 2010 Workshop

Background Economic Geography sponsored a workshop to brainstorm collectively the emerging research themes in economic geography. We gathered a small group of midcareer scholars from 19 institutions in 7 countries on April 12–13, 2010, in Washington, D.C., to address what we considered a collective concern: that our discipline could use a significant boost in theoretical and thematic developments at this particular juncture. The workshop was intended to be one of the journal’s many contributions to disciplinary activities and ongoing efforts to keep the discipline vibrant for the next generation.The workshop aimed to achieve multiple goals. First, this was an attempt to develop a sense of collective responsibility for the discipline’s future. Economic geography is no longer monological and singularly centered, as Peck and Olds (2007) observed in their assessment of the Summer Institute of Economic Geography. Indeed, prior to the workshop, quite a few participants reported that they did not have a particular identity affiliation to the discipline but instead enjoyed multiple disciplinary affiliations through joint appointments or appointments in multidisciplinary departments. The increasingly specialized and fragmented nature of the discipline and the resulting “disappearing of the middle” translate into fewer scholars who are dedicated to the discipline, which, in turn, endangers the survival of the discipline. As Johnston (2002, 425) stated, “eternal vigilance is necessary to survival” of a discipline, and mobilization, as in the language of Latour, is a first step in disciplinary change (Johnston 2006).Thus, as editors with a disciplinary name that crowns the journal, we thought that the time was ripe for a deliberate intellectual mobilization.ecge_1114 111..126

The Sociospatial Dynamics of Creativity and Production in Tanzanian Industry: Urban Furniture Manufacturers in a Liberalizing Economy

The author examines the design, production, and marketing activities of furniture makers in Mwanza, Tanzania and assesses the degree to which innovative and creative competencies and capabilities are emerging within this industry. A conceptual framework from evolutionary economics is applied, and emphasis is placed on situating the social and spatial characteristics of production, innovation, and knowledge creation within the selection environment or context created by Tanzanias economic liberalization process. Specifically, the cognitive, innovative, and organizational competencies and capabilities of furniture makers are detailed and their emergence is explained in relation to the markets, institutions, and spatial structures concomitant with neoliberal reform. The findings demonstrate how liberalization has, in effect, selected for less creative, smaller scale, and largely informal manufacturers while discouraging the development of more innovative, larger scale, and/or formal firms. In a broad sense, the results of the study raise questions about whether or not structural adjustment policies are contributing to the development of viable, globally oriented, and indigenously owned manufacturing firms in African cities like Mwanza.

Global Production Networks, Relational Proximity, and the Sociospatial Dynamics of Market Internationalization in Bolivia's Wood Products Sector

This article advances conceptualizations of global production networks (GPNs) through an analysis of the relational processes that firms in Bolivias growing wood products industry use to build ties to international markets. Both large- and small-scale manufacturers are increasingly internationalizing their operations in response to the global demand for tropical hardwoods and decentralization of control over the countrys forest resources. These firms use four different types of production networks and networking practices to develop international market ties. Each of these networks is distinguishable by its entry barriers, value-creation possibilities, upgrading strategies, and the cognitive, social, and cultural factors that influence who participates in them. There are important differences in the strategies used and challenges faced by Bolivian suppliers striving to develop relational proximity (i.e., a mutual alignment of interests) to international buyers or clients. These differences—in the role of power, positionality, social interactions, and local factors—create important discontinuities between the production networks that require distinct policy interventions. Beyond their policy implications, the findings contribute to theories on the role and dynamics of agency, power, and embeddedness in GPNs and raise important epistemological questions for economic geographers.

Representing the Economic Geographies of ‘Others’: Reconsidering the Global South

This essay examines how undergraduate economic geography courses in Anglo-American institutions traditionally frame economic activities in developing regions and asserts that mainstream approaches have devalued the complexity and diversity of economic geographies in the Global South. Focusing on developmentalism as a commonly used heuristic frame, it is argued that teachers and textbooks may provide only a partial representation of economic activities in the developing world and that this can lead to the marginalization of the Global South as a context for economic geography study and research. The essay concludes with ideas about how teachers might subvert these tendencies.

Africa's information revolution : technical regimes and production networks in South Africa and Tanzania

Series Editors Preface viii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xi Introduction xiii 1 ICT4D: The Making of a Neoliberalized Meta-discourse (with Bjoern Surborg) 1 2 ICTs and Economic Development in Africa: Theorizing Channels, Assessing Impacts 25 3 ICTs, Industrial Change, and Globalization in Africa: A Conceptual Framework 47 4 ICTs in Action: SMMEs and Industrial Change in South Africa and Tanzania 73 5 ICT Integration, Sociotechnical Regimes, and Global Production Networks 113 6 Downgrading and Differentiation in African SMMEs 147 7 Emerging Regime and GPN Configurations: Neo-intermediation and ICT-enabled Extraversion (with Bjoern Surborg) 176 8 Conclusion 200 References 215 Index 243

Smart Growth and the Scalar Politics of Land Management in the Greater Boston Region, Usa

Recent decades have witnessed a significant transformation in strategies of urban environmental governance as authority has shifted from statist command-and-control systems to more horizontal, networked forms of governance-beyond-the-state. In the USA the changing nature of state authority over urban-regional planning processes has been particularly dramatic in metropolitan regions promoting ‘smart-growth’ agendas. Smart-growth strategies address regional planning and land-development concerns through market-based incentive programs aimed at increasing development densities and coordinating other land-management priorities. This paper explores the scalar politics through which smart-growth policies in the Greater Boston region of Massachusetts (USA) are being constructed and contested. In this region the state of Massachusetts has used incentive programs, new forms of regulation, and public-private coalitions to implement a smart-growth agenda that seeks to ameliorate the regions housing crisis and sustain its pool of knowledge-economy workers, but these programs also challenge the traditional authority of local communities in governing land-use decisions. Crucial to this assertion of land-management authority at the state scale has been the legacies of past forms of authority and land management, the ability of the state to exploit the positionalities of key actors associated with the smart-growth agenda, and the role of crises (in housing, congestion) in making increased state control more palatable.