| 1. |
- Axelsson, Linn, et al.
(författare)
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Emerging topologies of transnational employment : 'Posting' Thai workers in Sweden’s wild berry industry beyond regulatory reach
- 2018
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 89, s. 1-10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper suggests a need to pay closer attention to the fact that employment is increasingly stretched across several regulatory regimes. This may help explain why governments, which rely on national legislative frameworks, struggle to protect the interests of transnationally mobile low-skilled workers. By adopting a topological approach to state regulation and authority, the paper demonstrates how powerful actors have reconfigured employment in Sweden’s wild berry industry in a spatial sense by engaging transnational subcontractors. It argues that transnational subcontracting inserts distance into employment relationships, thereby creating precarious migrant workers whose simultaneous absence and presence in several regulatory regimes places them partly beyond the regulatory reach of any one nation-state or nationally based trade union. The paper also argues that the Swedish government’s response to precarious working conditions in the wild berry industry can be understood as a series of attempts aimed at bringing transnational employment relationships within its regulatory reach. Drawing on topological spatial vocabulary, it shows how these attempts are less about the movement of state infrastructure into transnational space than about the stretching and folding of space itself, in an attempt to establish a powerful Swedish presence across distance. On the other hand, the paper concludes that transnational subcontracting opens up a space which enables wild berry actors to circumvent regulations and, as such, it remains very difficult for the Swedish government to reach into employment relationships in this industry.
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| 2. |
- Axelsson, Linn, et al.
(författare)
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On waiting, work-time and imagined futures : Theorizing temporal precariousness among Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry
- 2017
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 78, s. 169-178
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden – a country considered to have one of Europe’s most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal ‘waiting zones’ indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers’ imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting – for a return to China or settlement in Sweden – may be part of migrants’ strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories.
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| 3. |
- Brydges, Taylor, et al.
(författare)
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Consuming Canada : How fashion firms leverage the landscape to create and communicate brand identities, distinction and values
- 2018
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 90, s. 108-118
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the increasingly global and competitive fashion industry, firms are adopting a variety of strategies to generate value and brand loyalty. While some emphasise the quality of material elements such as inputs, local production and design, others focus on immaterial aspects such symbolic value and exclusivity. In recent years, place-branding has become an important way to create connections between people, places, and products. Yet, the processes behind this type of branding remain poorly understood. In particular, limited attention has been paid to the ways in which landscapes – in all their forms – are being incorporated into place-branding practices. Drawing on 87 interviews, participant observation and an innovative analysis of Instagram accounts, this paper examines how a range of Canadian fashion firms leverage the landscape to create and communicate brand identities, distinction and values. It demonstrates how firms of different sizes and scales construct, harness, or reimagine landscapes and/or popular stereotypes to connect with Canadian identities and consumers. It also highlights how landscape-centric branding can be combined with broader value creation strategies such as local production. In so doing, this paper brings together the economic geography literature on place branding and the cultural geography literature on landscape and identity, and makes a methodological contribution to nascent examinations of social media and visual data sources in geography.
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| 4. |
- Carmo, Renato M., et al.
(författare)
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Translocal mobility systems : social inequalities and flows in the wild berry industry
- 2019
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - Oxford : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 99, s. 102-110
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper uses the lens of translocality to investigate the seasonal mobility system of Thai berry pickers in Sweden: the perspective highlights the local-to-local relations that constitute this transnational and fluid mobility system. In this paper, we add the aspect of social inequalities to translocal studies, while arguing that multi-sited and locally grounded recruitment processes are contributing to produce and reproduce the mobility system. In the migrant-receiving area, stereotyping processes are active in shaping the selection of workers based on ethnicity, whereas in the migrant-sending area local asymmetries are visible in the selectivity of workers on the basis of age, wealth, and gender. In this way, the aspect of social inequalities, locally embedded at both ends of the recruitment process, is highlighted as a dimension to consider in translocal mobility systems. This is achieved through the analysis of multi-sited fieldwork in Sweden and Thailand that consisted of observations and interviews with Thai workers and representatives of the Swedish berry business.
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| 5. |
- Carton, Wim
(författare)
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Money for nothin’ and coal for free: ‘Technology neutrality’ and biomass development under the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme
- 2016
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 1872-9398 .- 0016-7185. ; 70, s. 69-78
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent literature has highlighted the creation of multiple equivalences as an important factor underpinning the rise of market-based mechanisms for environmental regulation. Extending these insights into the field of renewable energy policy, this article focuses on one example of this trend – namely the principle of technology neutrality as applied under the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme – and analyzes the concrete ways in which it has shaped the evolution of the Flemish renewable energy landscape. Concretely, the article shows that technology neutrality played a key role in promoting the uptake of biomass combustion in old coal power plants in Flanders, which led to a number of undesirable outcomes and gave rise to significant opposition. Correcting these shortcomings required a number of policy interventions on the part of the Flemish government that fundamentally moved the scheme away from the principle of technology neutrality and towards a more hybrid RE support system, suggesting that the promotion of technology neutrality was fundamentally misguided. Together with similar experiences from related market-based instruments, this suggests that the promotion of technology neutrality has far-reaching implications for the environmental effectiveness of climate and energy policies. In light of the continued promotion of the principle, the article calls for full recognition of the inherent technological choices that are being made through the promotion of policies that purport to be technology-neutral.
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| 6. |
- Christophers, Brett
(författare)
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Against (the idea of) financial markets
- 2015
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 66, s. 85-93
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The difference between bank-based and market-based financial systems is a longstanding and influential conceptual staple of the interdisciplinary literature on finance. This dualistic model has been subjected to wide-ranging critiques over the past decade. Yet, while those critiques productively problematize the relationship between banks and markets presumed by the model, they fail to address the underlying distinction between banks and markets that is also presumed by the model. This article questions that distinction. It argues that financial markets are best understood not as places or platforms where banks and other financial actors come to interact - and thus as essentially separate from banks - but, instead, as, in large part, their interaction; as constituted by it. The article further argues for the political as well as scholarly importance of reconfiguring our ideas of what financial markets are. The idea of markets as separate, reified phenomena not only underpins the scholarly model of bank- and market-based financial systems - it does political work in the wider world, with the appeal to financial markets or, more nebulously, "the market" to rationalize and justify political decision-making having become a commonplace of contemporary public policy discourse. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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| 7. |
- Christophers, Brett, 1971-
(författare)
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Seeing financialization? : Stylized facts and the economy multiple
- 2017
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 85, s. 259-268
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the most prominent stylized facts about contemporary capitalism concerns its "financialization." Like all economic stylized facts, however, facts about financialization are recognized by some commentators and not by others. This article offers one explanation why. It argues that the claims we can make about "the economy" depend upon how we envision that economy in the first place. The economy can be pictured in myriad ways - it is multiple, not singular - and different pictures of it enable the identification of different stylized facts about it. So it is with financialization. The article illustrates this by examining the history of two different traditions of picturing the economy. One - national accounting - increasingly has enabled financialization to be seen; the other - mainstream economics - generally has not.
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| 8. |
- Edstedt, Karin, et al.
(författare)
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The benefits that (only) capital can see? Resource access and degradation in industrial carbon forestry, lessons from the CDM in Uganda
- 2018
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 1872-9398 .- 0016-7185. ; 97, s. 315-323
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent research has shed light on the various tradeoffs involved in carbon forestry, i.e. the pursuit of international forestry projects to help mitigate climate change. This article contributes to these debates by highlighting the importance of resource quality and degradation in evaluating project benefits and tradeoffs. Focusing on the case of an industrial tree plantation in Uganda, the Kachung Forest Project, we highlight how the livelihoods of communities surrounding the reserve have been affected by interlinked changes in local resource access and resource quality. We show that the project has brought about a significant degradation of fuelwood sources, grazing and cultivation lands, and potentially increased pressure on scarce water sources, which in turn contributed to increased poverty in the area. We also argue that the community development interventions that project actors have pursued have primarily delivered ‘benefits that capital can see’, quick-fix solutions that fit within the profit-maximizing logic in which the forest company operates, while obscuring the underlying and resource-dependent drivers of poverty. Our study calls for closer attention to the interlinked socioecological changes underpinning the foundational tradeoffs – between cost-effective carbon sequestration and long-term environmental and developmental objectives – in the industry forestry model analysed here.
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| 9. |
- Ejermo, Olof, et al.
(författare)
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How important are local inventive milieus: The role of birthplace, high school and university education
- 2015
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 1872-9398 .- 0016-7185. ; 65, s. 387-397
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Using data on the entire population in combination with data on almost all individuals in Sweden listed as inventors, we study how the probability of being listed on a patent as inventor is influenced by the density of other future inventors residing in the same region. In this process, we control for demographic and sector effects along with the educational characteristics of parents. This approach allows us to trace how location history influences individuals' inventive capacity. We focus on three types of influences: (a) future inventors in the municipality around the time of birth, (b) future inventors around the time of graduation from high school and (c) future inventors at graduation from higher education. We find suggestive evidence that co-locating with future inventors may impact the probability of becoming an inventor. The most consistent effect is found for place of higher education; some positive effects are also evident from birthplace, whereas no consistent positive effect can be derived from individuals' high school location. Therefore, the formative influences mainly deriving from family upbringing, birth region and from local milieu effects arising from a conscious choice to attend a higher education affect the choice of becoming an inventor. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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| 10. |
- Eriksson, Madeleine, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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From blueberry cakes to labor strikes : Negotiating “legitimate labor” and “ethical food” in supply chains
- 2019
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; :105, s. 43-53
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Swedish wild-berry industry has become increasingly dependent on migrant workers. As the world market's demand for health and food ingredients increased, Swedish forest berries are exported to China to become nutraceutical products, while most berries consumed in Sweden now are imported cultivated berries. These changing geographies of production and consumption have resulted in a system of supply chains, that reproduce and manage difference between groups of workers and thus, make it difficult to safeguard labor rights. Moreover, this new“global standard” has great impacts on the cultural and political meanings of food. The aim of this paper is to study new emerging practices within the industry and to shed light on the production of representations of certain types of workers and work, and how this relate to supply chain capitalism. From the starting point of narratives collected within the different nodes of the supply chain, the paper focuses on the production, distribution and consumption of berry products as means to address how meanings of work and berries are negotiated. A specific focus is put on the narrated events during and after a strike where migrant workers tried to fight for better wages and living conditions. The workers not only lost the battle, but they were also expelled from Sweden without being paid. The work of the pickers and their agency is disconnected from discourses of labor and from Swedish laws and regulations, and the injustice is further justified and obscured through the lens of memories and nostalgia among Swedish consumers of berries.
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