Jane S. Pollard

Newcastle University | NCL · Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies

Since the financial crisis of 2008, subprime lending in the United States has flourished in auto loan markets. This article charts, for the first time, some of the contours of this under-researched part of the subprime landscape. In so doing, it makes two contributions. First, it widens and re-situates debates about subprime lending by building on...

Developing an evolutionary perspective towards the changing anatomy of the banking sector reveals the enduring tensions and contradictions between spatial centralisation and the possibilities for decentralisation before, during and after the British banking crisis. The shift from banking boom to crisis in 2007 is conceptualised as a significant and...

In economic geography and cognate disciplines, a good deal of attention has been paid to the roles of investors, lenders, analysts, advisors, actuaries, and other skilled financial professionals in forming and reproducing financial and other markets. Relatively neglected, by contrast, is the work of lawyers, judges and other legal agents. This arti...

In economic geography and cognate disciplines, a good deal of attention has been paid to the roles of investors, lenders, analysts, advisors, actuaries, and other skilled financial professionals in forming and reproducing financial and other markets. Relatively neglected, by contrast, is the work of lawyers, judges, and other legal agents. This art...

Brexit raises profound – as yet unanswerable questions – about future economic development in what is a multistate nation, the United Kingdom. This commentary forms part of a wider discussion on the impact of Brexit on the UK's political economy and financial geography.

The paper contributes to literature on the geographies of corporate philanthropy through a case study of the origins, growth and decline of the Northern Rock bank's charitable foundation. Analysis reveals the complex, geographically-embedded nature of philanthropic motivations and impacts. It demonstrates that investment in home and community by ph...

How, if at all, does financialisation affect small firms that have no direct exposure to capital markets? The paper argues the need to address this lacuna empirically, conceptually and politically. The paper then draws on research from a qualitative longitudinal analysis of UK small businesses in bio business and film and media sectors and identifi...

In 2013 the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes th...

ABSTRACTThe rise of Kuala Lumpur as an Islamic financial frontier. Regional Studies. This paper examines Kuala Lumpur?s emergence as a prominent global Islamic financial centre. Its distance from the West and the Middle East offers a frontier positioning that facilitates new social practices from the integration of financial knowledge of Western wo...

This article extends research exploring progressive models of reproducing economic life by reporting on research into some of the infrastructure, practices and motivations for Islamic charitable giving in London. In so doing the article: (i) makes visible sets of values, practices and institutions usually hidden in an otherwise widely researched in...

This paper argues that economic-geographical analyses of the recent financial crisis might learn from more than three decades of feminist scholarship on economic development. Feminist scholarship: (1) contributes to the ongoing project of rethinking how economic geography is conceived and practised; (2) provides some analytical resources to inform...

Dawley S., Marshall N., Pike A., Pollard J. and Tomaney J. Continuity and evolution in an old industrial region: the labour market dynamics of the rise and fall of Northern Rock, Regional Studies. The Northern Rock mortgage bank was a high-profile casualty of the credit crunch in 2007. An evolutionary geographical political economy approach demonst...

The collapse and subsequent nationalization of Northern Rock in 2007-08 was the first major run on a UK retail bank since 1866. The Northern Rock case is exemplary on two fronts. First, described at the time of its collapse as an example of an aggressive business model employed by naïve management, it is now clear that Northern Rock marked the begi...

This article examines the governance of Islamic finance in two non-Muslim-majority sites of its expansion, the United States and the United Kingdom. An alternative form of economic rationality is being constructed and practiced across diverse sociospatial contexts to produce what we term cosmopolitan financial geographies. Building from recent deba...

The Northern Rock mortgage bank was a high profile casualty of the credit crunch in 2007. A longitudinal investigation focused on the redundancy and resettlement of employees at the bank provides a case study of the labour market impact of the banking crisis on the North East of England. An evolutionary geographical political economy approach indic...

This article argues that financialization-shorthand for the growing influence of capital markets, their intermediaries, and processes in contemporary economic and political life-generates an analytical opportunity and political economic imperative to move finance into the heart of economic geographic analysis. Drawing upon long-standing concerns ab...

abstractThis article argues that financialization—shorthand for the growing influence of capital markets, their intermediaries, and processes in contemporary economic and political life—generates an analytical opportunity and political economic imperative to move finance into the heart of economic geographic analysis. Drawing upon long-standing con...

Who could have thought that banks would become nationalised, that state debts would reach historical levels, that bulge bracket investment banks would go bankrupt and that the masters of the universe would be so widely vilified? Each in their own way, the four reflections collected in this article address the new issues raised by the financial melt...

Because the economy is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things, in order for it to be 'seen' by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping. This is doubling, but with a difference; the map shifts the point of view so that viewers can see the whole as if from the o...

This paper considers some intellectual, practical and political dimensions of collaboration between human and physical geographers exploring how firms are using relatively new financial products – weather derivatives – to displace any costs of weather-related uncertainty and risk. The paper defines weather derivatives and indicates how they differ...

A significant trend in global finance over the last 15 years has been the rapid growth of Islamic banking and finance (IBF), which has gathered momentum to become a significant feature of the financial landscape in the twenty-first century. This paper explores the increasingly ‘Western’ character of IBF and has two key aims. First, we address the r...

Although economic-geographical research has recently been the subject of ‘cultural’, ‘institutional’, and ‘relational’ turns that stress the situated, relational, and embedded nature of economic activity, these concerns are usually elaborated through analyses of industrial, not financial, circuits of capital. In this paper I address the neglect of...

This article draws on critiques of 'global cities' to conceptualize Birmingham, the UK's second largest metropole, as a 'global' city by highlighting forms of economic globalization that draw on the city's residents, their histories and their social and cultural networks. The article illustrates some of the diversity and significance of minority et...

Cities now occupy a central role in economic regeneration. Literatures on such regeneration have focused on the supply side, neoliberal leanings of projects, the centrality of cultural production and consumption and the undemocratic, exclusionary geographies being produced through such regeneration schemes. This paper explores how urban regeneratio...

1 University of Birminghamj.s.pollard@bham.ac.uk

This paper argues that firm finance is something of a 'black-box' in economic geography, a largely take-for-granted aspect of production. Focusing on small firms, the paper argues that firm finance warrants analysis, not simply to 'add' to knowledge and to form another sub-discipline of economic geography, but in order to further develop and refine...

Birmingham is re-inventing itself through a strategy of prestige city centre regeneration. Drawing on the theoretical lenses of transnationalism and postcolonialism, we sketch one alternative vision of Birmingham’s economic place in the world. Through a focus on ‘ethnic diversity’, and the subsequent distinctiveness of the city’s economy, this pape...

A series of recent articles have debated the 'policy relevance' of economic geography. Whilst there is a long history of debates in geography about ‘relevance’, the recent articles about the status of economic geography have tended to focus on policy audiences and to compare economic geography with its social science neighbour, economics. In the co...

The entry of the three largest grocery retailers into retail financial services marks an escalation of competition in financial services retailing in Britain. This paper explores the increasingly porous boundaries between banking and retailing, focusing on changes in the economics of information gathering, shifts in the production, marketing and co...

This paper considers the relationship between space, place and the convergence of industrial structures and organizational forms by way of an analysis of the retail banking industry in the USA and the UK. The paper examines this process from two theoretical positions. It does so firstly by viewing the process of convergence through the analytical l...

A changing regulatory environment, intensified competition, and the increasingly global and privatised nature of financial markets have taken a heavy toll on the US banking industry. In the 1980s over 1100 banks failed in the United States, more than in any decade since the 1930s. In this paper I examine the relationship between the eroding competi...

The last 15 years have seen considerable debate over what constitutes the export-oriented motor of regional economies. Three kinds of activity are cited as the new generators of growth: industries handling information and advanced management functions, which we term "intellectual capital" industries; high technology, or what we term "innovation-bas...

There is widespread agreement that employers are seeking more ‘flexibility’ in their relations with labour and that the economic climate of the past 20 years or so has proved particularly favourable to employers as high unemployment and changes in labour market regulations have weakened the bargaining power of trade unions. In this paper, however,...