Andrew Herod

University of Georgia | UGA · Department of Geography

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...

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...

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...

IntroductionA Brief Literature SurveyIntroducing Variation into Cleaning Work Through New Equipment and the Interchange of Cleaning TasksResults and DiscussionIntroducing Variation in Cleaning Work Through Job EnlargementResults and DiscussionConclusion EndnotesReferences

The production of knowledge is a political act. As such, geographical knowledge reflects and embodies the material conditions and social relations existing at the time of its production. This recognition serves as our point of intellectual engagement with Geography in America at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century and provides the framework within...

Globalization is transforming the spatial organization of the world economy. In particular, it is leading to the “shrinking globe” phenomenon and the speeding up of social interaction between places across the planet. Given that international labor solidarity is a process of coming together across space, I argue that the spatial reorganization of g...

In this paper I argue that adopting an explicitly spatial theoretical framework can add significantly to our understanding of working-class life. Specifically, I argue that workers are spatial as well as historical social agents and that they seek to shape the economic landscape in ways which facilitate their political and economic goals, though th...

Gordon Clark. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xvii and 342 pp., diags., notes, and index. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 0-19-924047-7); $29.95 paper (ISBN 0-19-924048-5).

In this commentary I argue that the study of industrial relations must take matters spatial seriously and that scholars must engage with space at a substantive theoretical level. I outline three ways in which industrial relations practices are shaped by spatial considerations, namely through the pertinent actors' need to come to terms with the unev...

In this paper I examine two case studies of workers fighting against transnationally organized corporations. In the first case, a 1990–1992 dispute between the United Steelworkers of America and the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation, union workers developed an international campaign to pressure the corporation to rehire them after they had been locke...

This paper analyzes the spatial and temporal dynamics of the 1998 General Motors-United Auto Workers dispute to examine what implications ‘lean’ production methods may have for organized labor. Whereas much writing on new forms of production organization has tended to see such developments in ‘either/ or’ terms — either as an attack on unions in th...

How do our everyday actions shape and transform the world economy? This volume of original essays argues that current scholarship in international political economy (IPE) is too highly focused on powerful states and large international institutions. The contributors examine specific forms of 'everyday' actions to demonstrate how small-scale actors...

Believing that education is vital to improving the conditions of workers in the globalized economy, this study assesses the work of 10 leading worker education programs. The place of globalization in the programs and their stance toward international solidarity are analyzed, and the programs are ranked by using criteria to determine whether they ar...

In this commentary I suggest that three sets of processes -- a dramatic shrinking of distance between places, a growing global interconnection of economies, and the increasing importance for many corporations of an 'international strategy' -- are having fundamental impacts on workers and workplaces. Although these processes are playing out in geogr...

In this commentary I suggest that three sets of processes-a dramatic shrinking of distance between places, a growing global interconnection of economies, and the increasing importance for many corporations of an 'international strategy'-are having fundamental impacts on workers and workplaces. Although these processes are playing out in geographica...

Using open-ended interviews to conduct research on foreign elites raises methodological questions which conducting research on non-foreign elites and foreign non-elites does not. In this paper I first reflect upon some of the practical issues I have encountered when conducting interviews with members of foreign elites. I then examine the issue of p...

In this article I explore some aspects of the 1998 General Motors/United Auto Workers dispute to suggest that industrial disputes such as this can be used productively to teach about economic geography. In particular, the temporal and spatial aspects of the dispute's spread from two plants in Flint, Michigan, to the point where virtually all of Gen...

Research on labour markets has often focused on the economics of work location. Far less attention has been paid to how labour markets are constructed discursively. In this paper, I analyse how the creation of rival discourses concerning traditions of work were central elements in the efforts of two unions to structure local labour markets, in orde...

This paper examines the changing landscape of organized labor in the Southeast between 1947 and today. To do so, it looks at several indicators of organized labor's experience in the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The indicators examined are percentage of the no...

This paper examines the production of new geographical scales of contract bargaining in the United States east coast longshore industry during the post-Second World War period. In particular, it analyses how the International Longshoremen's Association, which represents east coast waterfront workers, forged a national contract in response to politi...

Mainstream neoclassical economic geography and its Marxist critique have largely failed to incorporate active conceptions of working class people in their explanations of the location of economic activities. Neoclassical approaches tend to conceive of workers simply as factors of location, whereas Marxist approaches primarily focus on how capital s...

Economic geographers have neglected the international activities of workers and working class organizations. Worker invisibility has been particularly evident in explanations of the geography of foreign direct investment. Yet for over a century workers have built international labor organizations which have shaped economic and political geographies...

Marxist geography has been at the forefront of understanding the urban dynamic of advanced capitalism. There is, however, a paradox in much of this work. Whereas Marxist geographers implicitly take workers' experiences under capitalism as their political starting point, ironically, much Marxist work in urban geography has tended to ignore workers'...

The open-ended interview is gaining widespread acceptance within human geography as a research method. Frequently, such interviews can provide researchers with a richer account of events than can larger scale, standardized statistical approaches. However, researchers using interviews as part of their information gathering practices need to be aware...

The Reagan Administration, as part of a broad strategy to provide greater flexibility of investment opportunities for capital and to undermine organized labor, lifted the bans on homework in six of the seven industries in which it was originally regulated in 1942. The Administration argued that deregulation would give women greater freedom to combi...