Kendra Strauss

Cognition, Context, and Multimethod Approaches to Economic Decision Making

Research in behavioural economics, as in economic geography, seeks to address fundamental questions about cognition, the status of human rationality, and social-cum-spatial structure in economic decision making. Critiques of the ‘strong’ model of economic rationality that underpins models of behaviour in orthodox economics by those working under the rubric of the former, such as Thaler and Sunstein, are gaining the attention of politicians and policy makers. Yet the ‘limits to rationality’ thesis nevertheless lacks a credible appreciation of the diversity of social life and the significance of context in framing behaviour. Economic geography, while taking seriously the issues of the coconstitution of culture and economy and the relational nature of economic decision making, has moved away from behaviouralism at a time when critical approaches are arguably more salient than ever. I put forward the argument for an engagement with behavioural economic approaches to decision making while critically examining the need for multimethod approach that can accommodate quantitative, statistical, and experimental approaches and qualitative work that takes seriously social identity and attributes including gender, age, social class, and aspirations. The challenge of theorising the social context in which choices are made is discussed with reference to Bourdieus notion of habitus, and three exemplars are used to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of different methodological approaches. Herbert Simons metaphor, which conceptualises the decision-making moment as a pair of scissors, is suggested as a way of thinking about the intersection between cognition and the decision-making environment.

With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality:

In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of ‘the urban’ and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for urban theory. Our intervention in these debates, which to date have focused primarily on Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis regarding ‘planetary urbanization’, highlights the absence of an engagement with the long legacy within feminist urban scholarship of confronting and dismantling the categories of the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. We argue that attending to this legacy foregrounds two conceptual and intellectual challenges that Lefebvre sets for us in his writings on the urban phenomenon. The first relates to Lefebvre’s arguments about the central role that a focus on difference and everyday life must play in understanding late capitalist urbanization and the urban condition. The second relates to Lefebvre’s articulation of the simultaneous problem and imperative of epistemological plurality within urban theory, including the role he ascribed to intellectual cooperation on the study of the urban phenomenon. We conclude by offering some thoughts on the importance Lefebvre attached to residual forms of difference – both lived and epistemological – in urban research and action, and by extension, probe some of the limits of Lefebvrian frameworks for understanding the contemporary urban condition.

In, against and beyond neo-liberalism: The “crisis” and alternative political futures

School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, East Quadrangle, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK; Department of Geography, The Labour Studies Program & The Morgan Centre for Labour Research, Simon Fraser University, AQ 6220, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby BC, Canada V5A 1S6; Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK

These Overheating Worlds

In 2003 the British literary magazine Granta published an issue on climate change, “This Overheating World,” containing reportage and essays but almost no fiction—and the claim that our “failure of the imagination” regarding socioenvironmental change is both a political and a literary one. The decade since has seen a relative burgeoning of what has been dubbed “cli-fi,” dominated by apocalyptic and dystopian literary–geographical imaginations. In this article I ask this question: If these are our ways of imagining the future, what are the relationships among cultural imaginaries, theories, and politics of socioenvironmental change? Engaging the work of Frederic Jameson on utopia, and the novels of Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver, I argue that the flourishing interest in narrative, stories, and storytelling in human geography opens up opportunities for exploring political imaginaries of climate change through utopian and dystopian impulses present in its “fictionable worlds.”

Economic Geography and the Financial Crisis: Full Steam Ahead?

This article considers whether the growing theoretical and methodological diversity or pluralistic nature of economic geography contributes to its lack of engagement outside the discipline and academy. Although we are enthusiastic about the vibrancy this pluralism brings, we also speculate that it contributes to the disciplines tendency to fall short of significantly impacting key debates in the social sciences. In particular, we consider the disciplinary challenges to influencing mainstream debates over financialization and the recent financial crisis and the recurring lament that economic geography “misses the boat” by failing to significantly impact key scholarly and policy issues. Specifically, we suggest that methodological and theoretical diversity, local contextualization, and relational analysis, all of which we support as vital to the discipline, make it difficult to isolate a disciplinary core. We conclude that pluralism produces a vibrant discipline with unique explanatory power but that it also has important impacts on the design, execution, and influence of geographers’ research outside the discipline.

Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make?

This special section of Environment and Planning A is the outcome of a panel we organized at the Fourth Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG) held in Oxford, UK in August 2015. The panel was intended to reflect on the role and influence of feminist work in economic geography; a sub-discipline distinguished by its heterogeneous theoretical and methodological approaches. In particular, it sought to encourage reflection on the extent to which economic geography as a sub-discipline has responded to feminist interventions that have drawn attention to the cultural construction of difference in ways that pose a challenge to its more generalized categories and frameworks of analysis (for example, regional development, labour, the firm, the state). Taking as our starting point, Linda McDowell’s (1991) article ‘Life without Father and Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism’, which was published a quarter of a century ago (and revisited 10 years later, see McDowell, 2001), we asked to what extent and in what ways feminism (here referred to in the singular, but clearly ‘feminisms’ in practice) has changed the way economic geography is done? To what degree has the sub-discipline benefitted from the attention paid over the past 25 years to reproductive and domestic labour, the gender order and the interactions of categories of difference such as gender, class and race in our research enquiries? In presenting a case for the importance of gender in understanding an emerging postFordist economy, McDowell’s (1991) article was tremendously significant in pushing scholars of economic geography to examine the interconnections between the sphere of production and the sphere of social reproduction (a category of analysis which includes the family, the community and the welfare state). It highlighted the gendering of skills

Sorting victims from workers: Forced labour, trafficking, and the process of jurisdiction

This paper builds on work on forced labour and human trafficking to argue for the value of geographical approaches to legal scale, and for more geographical research on the process of jurisdiction. Vulnerability to forced labour and human trafficking is related to processes of social and political categorization and legal characterization. Yet territorial understandings of jurisdiction, and those which conceptualize jurisdiction as a process of sorting, often imply a relatively straightforward correspondence between legal scales and legal subjects. I propose an approach to legal scale that builds on feminist analyses in labour law and human geography.

Unfreedom and workers’ power: ever-present possibilities

Trafficking, forced labour and related phenomena have been documented time and again in recent years by advocacy groups, the media and government agencies. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 20.9 million people in some form of forced labour worldwide. The estimate is broken down regionally and sectorally: 11.7 million of these are thought to be in the Asia and Pacific region; and 18.7 million are believed to be in the private economy, among whom 14.2 million are involved in economic activities not related to sexual exploitation. Debt bondage appears to be the most common mechanism of forced labour (cf. ILO 2005; 2012; Andrees and Belser 2009). The prevalence of labour relations characterized by various forms of unfreedom raises critical questions about how the phenomenon fits into the contemporary economy, and therefore about how to address the issue(s) in ways that advance the interests of all exploited workers.

Accessing pension resources: the right to equality inside and out of the labour market

Pensions constitute an important link, in many welfare regimes, between processes of social categorisation and labour market segmentation over the life-course. Pensions also reveal how socio-economic rights are defined in relation to normative and ideological categories (such as gender, class and race), how (and for whom) the state prioritises their distribution, and what these processes reveal about notions of equality and their political and legal institutionalisation. In this paper, I argue that pensions, especially but not only occupational pensions, therefore fall within the ambit of a broad conception of labour law; they should be of interest to feminist legal scholars not solely because of their linkages to paid employment, however, but because of their relationship with the organisation of both production and social reproduction – and the evolution of norms of equality across these domains.

Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity?

This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly dominant frame in critical studies of labour and the employment relation, and resonant in the political sphere within (and now beyond) Europe, precarity has seen slower uptake by geographers. However, research on migrant labour and emerging work on technological change, flexibilization, restructuring and insecurity is employing precarity as a multi-dimensional conceptual framework. In this sense, I argue that the distinction between notions of precarity grounded in political economy and those grounded in political philosophy is increasingly – and productively – blurred. As I illustrate, this blurring is apparent in labour geography’s ongoing and deepening engagement with precarity, yet our distinctive contribution to a spatialized theorization of precarity remains, I argue, an open question.