Andrew Herod

• PhD, MA, B. Soc Sci.
• Professor at University of Georgia

Creating a circular economy (CE) is considered central to solving problems like climate change and resource depletion. In this context, the concept of global destruction networks was developed to better theorise using waste in new production. However, CE advocates also seek to avoid waste production by extending products’ lives. These efforts occur...

This paper adopts a Geographical Political Economy perspective to critically investigate how successive economic crises occurring from 2009 onwards (including the COVID-19 pandemic) affected youth labour markets in Greece, Italy, and Spain. To do so, it first calculates a Resilience Index for three youth employment types (total, part-time, and temp...

State labour inspection has been relatively underresearched in economic and labour geography, despite its prospective role in tackling worker exploitation as part of national state regulatory strategies. This paper seeks to address this gap by critically examining state labour inspection as a government function capable of upholding labour standard...

Following the economic crisis of 2008/2009, the European Union developed the Youth Guarantee (YG) Action Plan to tackle youth labour market disengagement by 'fostering employability' and 'removing barriers' to employment. The current study adopts a Geographical Political Economy approach to analysing the YG's underpinnings and the conditions that d...

Our paper “Inter-regional underemployment and the industrial reserve army: precarity as a contemporary Greek drama” is the recipient of the 2022 Jim Lewis Prize. The paper was published in print in Vol 28, Issue 4, 2021 of European Urban and Regional Studies (EURS). In this short piece (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09697764221136479) we...

The structure of corporations has often been understood to result from the investment decisions made by managers. Such a view sees workers in largely passive terms of being simply “factors of production.” However, in the past three decades a group of self‐described Labor Geographers has demonstrated that workers can forcefully shape corporate organ...

In this article we look at waste and working on waste. In particular, we set out a case against analyses that see working on waste as somehow outside of capitalism, an informal system quite separate from, and other to, formal work. To do so, we first outline the nature of contemporary waste production. We then put forward three caveats to the emerg...

COVID-19 is a global pandemic but has a particular geography to it, differentially affecting people and places. Here we explore its impact upon labour markets in the Mediterranean European Union (EU) countries. Our analysis is part of a collective work-in-progress monitoring the pandemic's effects upon workers since early March 2020. First we note...

An account of my journey from an English schoolboy interested in landscapes to academic geographer, and the role that my engagement with Marx has played in that intellectual odyssey.

We detail how the world’s two largest engineering machinery firms, Japan’s Komatsu and the us’s Caterpillar, actively managed geographical concerns to become global actors. We argue that their globalization was not a teleological given but had to be proactively made. Both the state and organized labor played significant roles in shaping their geogr...

Gentrification and labour precarisation constitute prominent responses to urban capitalist crises. They have typically been addressed in the literature as distinct processes. Even though they can indeed occur independently of one another, here we argue that they are also often deeply interconnected. To do so, we utilise a mix of fieldwork and secon...

Los debates sobre la escala geográfica han cambiado radicalmente la forma de la geografía humana anglófona en las tres últimas décadas. A la cabeza de la discusión hay dos grupos de preguntas de mayor importancia: ¿cuál es el estado ontológico de la escala?, y ¿cómo las maneras como imaginamos que el mundo está escalado afectan nuestro comportamien...

We explore the 2008/2009 economic crisis in Greece and its impact upon employment precarity. Specifically, we focus upon changing regional patterns of waged part-timerism during three periods: the 2005-2008 pre-crisis period; the 2009-12 deep recession; and the 2013-2016 period of mild stabilization. Our analysis reveals important geographical and...

en The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Dis...

Developed largely by Marxist geographer David Harvey, the concept of the “spatial fix” has been central to efforts to theorize uneven development under capitalism. The term refers to how capitalists seek to make the economic geography of capitalism in certain ways, either to facilitate accumulation or to try to temporarily address crises of overacc...

In this paper I first detail some of the geographical concepts that help us make sense of capitalism’s spatiality. I then provide several brief vignettes which illustrate how conflicts over how capitalism’s geography is made can be central to disputes both between and within groups of workers and capitalists. The paper’s purpose is to argue that un...

Issues of labor have long been central to understanding the location of economic activities ‐Weber's locational model, for example, was based, in part, on the geography of labor costs. However, for most of the twentieth century, economic geographers have tended to see labor purely in terms of its costs to capital and how these impacted firms' locat...

The structure of corporations has often been understood to result from the investment decisions made by managers. Such a view sees workers in largely passive terms of being simply “factors of production.” However, in the past three decades a group of self‐described labor geographers has demonstrated that workers can forcefully shape corporate organ...

In this paper I first outline some of the tenets of what has come to be called, in the Anglophonic world, Labor Geography. This is an approach to understanding the making of the economic geography of capitalism which sees workers as geographical agents whose political-economic behavior is both shaped by the spatiality of the landscapes within which...

Στο βιβλίο αυτό επιχειρείται η πρώτη στην ελληνική βιβλιογραφία εμβάθυνση στη Γεωγραφία της Εργασίας. Η Γεωγραφία της Εργασίας αποτελεί ένα, σχετικά νέο, γνωστικό πεδίο και τομέα ερευνητικού ενδιαφέροντος που μελετά την αλληλεπίδραση και τους αμοιβαίους μετασχηματισμούς μεταξύ εργατικής δράσης και χωρο-κοινωνικών συνθηκών. (This book is the first...

Although there has been a proliferation of writing recently on global commodity/value chains and production networks, labour and employment relations have been largely absent or conceived of in a limited manner in these discussions. As a counter to this, we argue for locating employment relations, labour and the labour process at the heart of analy...

This paper studies workers’ resistance to the spread of informal and flexible employment patterns in Greece during the ongoing economic crisis. It focuses upon the spatial aspects of two strikes, the first by immigrant agricultural workers employed in the strawberry fields of Nea Manolada, in the Peloponnesus region, and the second by steelworkers...

Everywhere we go, it seems, we hear about globalisation. And, if we are associated with a labour movement in any way, we often hear a corollary to this globalisation talk – ‘workers must organise globally!’, ‘unions must internationalise!’, and many similar such statements. Certainly, I don’t want to suggest here that these are not important elemen...

The concept of “flexicurity” (encouraging flexible work arrangements while also ensuring various social protections for workers) has been much lauded in recent years within the European Union. This paper examines how practices of flexicurity are working for immigrant workers living in Preveza, a prefecture located within the Greek region of Epirus...

Neste artigo procuro traçar duas linhas de reflexão. Em primeiro lugar, vou apresentar um breve panorama de como, o que veio a ser chamado de "Labor Geography", desenvolveu-se enquanto um campo vibrante de pesquisa no mundo da língua inglesa e quais são alguns dos seus princípios centrais. Em segundo lugar, argumentarei sobre algumas semelhanças e...

Waste in general, and e-waste in particular, has become a topic of interest in recent years. One focus of attention has been on how commodities are broken up after the putative end of their lives, with such commodities' constituent elements then being used as inputs into other products. The fact that much waste is recycled in this manner has led se...

This paper studies workers’ agency in the context of government austerity measures in contemporary, crisis-hit Greece. It focuses upon the spatial aspects of two cases of worker mobilisation. The first of these involves powerworkers who supported widespread popular protests against a new property tax designed to raise government revenues. Important...

The literature on global production networks (GPNs) and global commodity/value chains has generally conceptualised small firms as being at the bottom of the commodity chain hierarchy, and thus subordinate to larger firms. As a consequence, small firms and their employees are typically imagined to be fairly powerless to shape the structure of GPNs....

Analysis of waste has largely focused on the physical transformation of commodities at the ends of their lives. This has led to a discourse of ongoingness in which the re-use of commodities’ parts is often seen to be almost endless. Such a focus on form, though, fails to adequately account for the movement of value—used here in the Marxist sense of...

In this paper I first detail some of the geographical concepts that help us make sense of capitalism's spatiality. I then provide several brief vignettes which illustrate how conflicts over how capitalism's geography is made can be central to disputes both between and within groups of workers and capitalists. The paper's purpose is to argue that un...

Both workers and employers must come to grips with capitalism’s spatial organization, and how they do so shapes the kinds of political behaviors in which they engage. In this article the authors explore how two different groups of European workers—dockers and seafarers—have responded to liberalization efforts and suggest that their differential suc...

Commodity chains that are global in extent have increasingly come to be seen as the defining element of the contemporary globalized world economy. Since the 1990s a body of theory — evolving from global commodity chain analysis to global value chain analysis to global production network analysis — has focused upon understanding how such commodity c...

This article takes the 25th anniversary of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space as an opportunity to consider the seminal contributions the book has made for pushing scholars to more deeply consider the connections between the persistence of capitalism and social reproduction. Furthermore, we move on from thi...

Company towns are the product of their designers' hope that shaping the built environment in particular ways will allow them to further their political, economic, and cultural goals, whether these be exerting greater control over their labor force, ensuring the development of particular types of industrial relations, or, perhaps more altruistically...

Geographical scale is a central concept enabling us to make sense of the world we inhabit. Amongst other things, it allows us to declare one event or process a national one and another a global or regional one. However, geographical scales and how we think about them are profoundly contested, and the spatial resolution at which social processes tak...

'This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the analytical interactions between geography, space, work and employment. Space is not simply a banal backdrop against which work and employment processes and relations operate. Rather, the specific geographical context both colours, and is coloured by, the modes and nature of work and employment t...

Themes in the Geographic Study of Labor UnionsTheoretical and Methodological DebatesUnions in the New EconomyConcluding CommentsAcknowledgmentEndnotesBibliography

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Theorists of work and employment (W&E) practices should more seriously engage with literatures concerning how space is constitutive of social praxis. Rather than simply serving as a stage upon which social life is played out or being merely a reflection of social relations, the construction of the economic landscape in particular ways is fundamenta...

In this article, we argue for a deeper and more theoretically informed engagement between the fields of industrial relations and geography. We lay out a number of concepts developed more fully by geographers and show, through four vignettes, how such concepts can add to our understanding of industrial relations practices.

Neoliberalism and the Destruction of Fordist Work Organization Professionalizing Cleaning Work Resisting Neoliberalism Acknowledgments Endnotes References

This paper examines changes in the commercial cleaning industry in Australasia which are occurring against a backdrop of significant transformation in the mode of labour market regulation in both countries. Specifically, whereas for most of the twentieth century both Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia had systems of labour market regulation in whic...