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Annals of The Association of American Geographers | 2011

Governmentality as Epistemology

Nancy Ettlinger

This article presents Foucaults governmentality as an analytical framework that is useful for interpreting and using empirics toward critical theory. Although Foucault viewed the discipline of geography narrowly regarding spatial patterns, his geographic sensibilities connect with contemporary critical human geography, which examines processes relationally from a topological, non-Euclidean view of space. Further, Foucaults novel approach to multiscalar analysis offers critical insight into one debate: whether scale as an analytical concept unproductively reifies hierarchy and obscures the mobilization of power. Foucaults ascending analysis clarifies how scale-sensitive analysis can illuminate the mobilization of power regarding its targets (as per techniques of biopower and disciplinary power) and its diffuse sources, and how actors’ practices can become unchained from normalizing societal pressures. Foucaults early scholarship on governmentality represents actors as unconscious of the regulatory framework with which they implicitly are complicit, but his later work on resistance emphasizes reflexivity and the proactive constitution and transformation of the self. The earlier framework on the governance of populations suggests that mentalities and related discourses produce practices, whereas the later framework on the governance of the self suggests the reverse, therein holding important clues for critical theory and the proactive construction of transformation based on a critique of the past and present. The article “assembles” Foucaults scholarship on governance and ethics over the course of his career to present an overall framework that is useful for analyses concerning a variety of questions. Analytical points are exemplified with reference to urban, race-related issues, drawing in part from my own research.


Economic Geography | 1994

The Localization of Development in Comparative Perspective

Nancy Ettlinger

Economic development increasingly is a local, bottom-up phenomenon in the context of global restructuring, budget crises, and reduced funding to regions and cities. Neither the public nor private sectors can adequately plan for change alone; thus, government and business have entered into a partnership to achieve local development. To date, however, the effectiveness of many local initiatives is uncertain. Through comparative examination of different national contexts and types of places within nations, this article specifies the conditions under which we may expect development strategies to succeed. Despite similar developmental avenues in the United States and many European countries, outcomes are mediated by national context, specifically by mode of production and institutionalized industrial and labor relations. Modes of production that engender principles of cooperation and collaboration in the workplace are more likely to encourage partnership principles between government and business, as well as among firms and citizens. Within nations, however, the parameters of social relations that are defined by the national mode of production may be mediated by social relations within locales. Specifically, cooperativeness and sense of community formed and sustained through the dynamic of kin and non-kin networks are critical prerequisites to effective local development strategy, which may otherwise falter without policies to engender appropriate social relations and articulate production and consumption concerns. Contriving change may be more feasible in locales that have been shaken by crisis, dismantling the sociopolitical relations of a previous order to allow for evaluation.


Progress in Human Geography | 1999

Local trajectories in the global economy

Nancy Ettlinger

This article offers a framework for conceptualizing local development, specifically in the context of foreign direct investment (FDI). I establish my conceptual framework through a critique of three inter-related yet distinct literatures - the literature on development, broadly conceptualized (i.e., not necessarily referring to local development), the literature on globalization, also broadly conceptualized (i.e., not necessarily focused on FDI) and the literature on local impacts of FDI, which is a crosscutting subset of development and globalization. All these literatures are polarized; I wish to offer a more nuanced perspective. My critique offers a normative definition of ‘local development’ based on 1) an inclusionary definition of development and 2) convergence of corporate and worker well-being. Although empirical realities rarely correspond with normative constructs, such constructs are useful in examining and assessing change, if we specify the contingent conditions that impede or foster an idealized outcome. I specify these conditions with reference to several mediating factors, notably: mode of production, and its interplay with policy and local context, understanding that agency crosscuts all these factors.


Economic Geography | 1990

WORKER DISPLACEMENT AND CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING: A POLICY-CONSCIOUS APPRAISAL

Nancy Ettlinger

This article examines the problem of worker displacement from the perspective of non-traditional corporate strategies. Fundamentally different types of corporate strategies, reflecting different production contexts, such as Fordist and other modes of production, require different policy responses. In the past, policies addressing worker displacement have been post hoc, focusing principally on groups of unemployed people. New forms of work organization and management resilience offer the promise of developing policies that affect corporate strategy. Accordingly, policy may be designed to prevent worker displacement through constructive, not coercive, public- private sector coordination. Three representative types of non-traditional corporate strategies are identified and discussed in terms of their implications for policy. The concluding section discusses the geographic implications of people-targeted policies in terms of the geography of urban labor markets in the contemporary U.S. industrial environment.


Progress in Human Geography | 2008

The predicament of firms in the new and old economies: a critical inquiry into traditional binaries in the study of the space-economy

Nancy Ettlinger

Working with the assumption that the social and the material are mutually embedded, this article suggests that actors in the business world tend to separate social from material concerns despite the entanglement of these two dimensions. This disconnection — a binary logic applied in the context of blurry realities — creates problems, the resolution of which requires change in production logic. The predicament of firms is the apparent inability of actors to develop a production logic that recognizes the entwinement of the material and the social; rather than changing from a unidimensional to a multidimensional logic, strategies continuously oscillate between one unidimensional logic (emphasizing social or material concerns) and another (emphasizing the opposite), thus perpetuating the predicament. The oscillation occurs in both the old and new economies, but is compressed in the new economy. Recognizing this oscillation in the new and old economies requires dehomogenizing each to uncover problems that prompt change. Recognizing the transformation of production logics within the old and new economies requires awareness of, and retreat from, binary logic in academic analysis.


Journal of Geography in Higher Education | 2006

Priorities in Teaching Economic Geography: Placing the Economy, Sense of Geographies, Intellectual Bridging

Nancy Ettlinger

This paper identifies some personal priorities in teaching economic geography. The author places the economy relationally regarding social, cultural and political dimensions of life; she clarifies different modes of geographic inquiry-geographies; and she taps the breadth of economic geography by including a wide range of substantive topics. She discusses internal differentiation regarding substantive topics and modes of geographic inquiry as an asset, offering ground for cross-fertilization of ideas. The course is demanding, and this is appreciated by most, but not all, students. From the authors vantage point, the course both informs and is informed by her research-stimulating experience.


Environment and Planning A | 1997

An assessment of the small-firm debate in the United States

Nancy Ettlinger

In this article I critically assess the ongoing debate regarding the role of small to medium-sized firms (SMEs) in economic development, and take the position that these firms are critical elements of local development and political economy. My discussion encompasses research findings from a variety of national contexts, but the general focus is on the United States. I dispute neither that large firms are important agents of change and wield tremendous power nor that SMEs may be problematic regarding either corporate competitiveness or social welfare. The stance adopted here is that questions are misguided because they focus on firm size as an independent variable to explain job generation or firm performance. Following a critical overview of data-related and analytical issues, I argue that problems as well as tactics conventionally associated with large firms may also characterize SMEs as they develop strategies to cope with new pressures in the global economy. Corporate culture, including the culture of both labor and management, as well as ability and willingness of labour and management to collaborate and implement new strategies, condition firm behavior and affect competitiveness, irrespective of firm size. Substantial variation in context (national as well as subnational) also affects firm behavior and prompts reevaluation and empirical substantiation of conventional assumptions about firm size that have governed the debate. Some SMEs may contribute to local economic development through a variety of processes. However, sanguine views about SME competitiveness must be tempered by the understanding that corporate welfare commonly occurs at the expense of worker welfare. This latter problem is considered inherent in the traditional Anglo-American Taylorist approach to production, irrespective of firm size. General policy guidelines are offered to integrate goals of production and consumption so that policies to develop corporate and worker welfare reinforce rather than counteract one another.


Small Business Economics | 1996

Evaluating Small Firm Performance in Local Context: A Case Study of Manufacturers in Columbus, Ohio

Nancy Ettlinger; Michelle Tufford

This research approaches corporate restructuring from a place-based perspective, departing from firm or industry-specific analysis and focusing instead on the performance and problems of a local economy. The study systematizes data from a survey of small manufacturing firms in Columbus, Ohio, offering a methodology that can be used for comparative analyses of sectors within or among communities.We link the performance of firms and local context using a sampling strategy that represents local industry mix. We recognize the multidimensional character of performance and employ several indicators, stated in both static and dynamic terms. We use these indicators to identify patterns of firm performance, relative to both national and local standards. Discriminant analyses reveal variables that account for differences among groups of firms, identified by level of performance, industry, and mode of labor-management relations.Results indicate that small manufacturers in Columbus are relatively uncompetitive. The few high performing firms are investing more in labor than in capital, but most firms are investing more in capital than labor. These findings are consistent with American corporate tradition that deemphasizes workers. Effective restructuring entails more than technical change, which enables competitiveness but does not itself engender it.


Environment and Planning A | 1981

Dependency and urban growth: a critical review and reformulation of the concepts of primacy and rank-size

Nancy Ettlinger

Concepts of city-size distributions are critically reviewed and reformulated. City-size distributions are conceptualized in terms of a continuum that is not necessarily unidirectional. Processes of urban growth and decline are explained with reference to interurban linkages and dominance-dependence relationships within and across national boundaries.


Environment and Planning A | 2016

The governance of crowdsourcing: Rationalities of the new exploitation

Nancy Ettlinger

Drawing from literatures in business, the burgeoning field of human computation, and media studies together with economic geography and social theory, this paper contextualizes corporate crowdsourcing in regimes of work and specifies and examines the rationalities governing this early 21st century round of exploitation. I refer to “rationalities” in the Foucauldian sense as the calculated ways by which mentalities become inscribed in a regime of practices, in this case, new practices of work. I present crowdsourcing as the means by which the regime of labor is governed in novel systems of production regarding open innovation as well as non-innovative yet skilled microtasks. I engage firm rationalities of decentralization, which have developed differently for innovative and non-innovative activity; wageless work; JIT labor (distinct from JIT production); precarization; informalization; fungibility; and invisibility. In the penultimate section, I draw from Foucault’s conceptualization of human capital to address rationalities of self-governance among workers, a crucial issue because it is the crowd’s willingness to accept as little as nothing that fuels the new exploitation, an insidiously efficient governmentality. I question an assumed homogenized subjectivity among the “cybertariat,” and conclude with thoughts about critical ingredients for a new, virtual frontier of resistance strategies.

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Fernando J. Bosco

San Diego State University

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Jeffrey R. Crump

University of Nebraska–Lincoln

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Edward M. Bergman

Vienna University of Economics and Business

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