Clark University

Review
Author(s): Barney Warf
Review by: Barney Warf
Source: Economic Geography, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 101-102
Published by: Clark University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/144543
Accessed: 19-12-2015 12:17 UTC

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 BOOKREVIEWS
placed in a position where resistance is dif-
ficult,"he writes. "This'new political local-
ism' for labor has played into the hands of
national and multinational corporations
that increasingly divide workers in differ-
ent localities againsteach other in the com-
petition to maintain high profit levels." He
goes on to say, "local modes of organizing
and place-based opposition by unions can
make a difference. But whether these can
provide the basis for an effective counter-
hegemonic discourse depends on the pres-
ence of enabling organizationaland politi-
cal capacities at the local level" (pp.
326-27). Jonas seeks a balance between
privileging the local and advocatingglobal-
scale struggle: "At a time of intensifying
international competition, political decen-
tralization, and ideologically motivated
political assaultson unions, an emphasis on
locally based political action seems to be
dangerously misplaced" (p. 346). Working
out the balance between local empower-
ment and larger-scaletransformationof the
economic landscape is an importantproject
indeed.
Each piece of the collection makes a
strong argument for considering the role of
workers in shaping the geography of pro-
duction and social relations across space
and in particularplaces and is sure to make
a majorcontributionto the ongoing project
of refining our earlier analyses of the social
construction of economic geographies.
Herod's attempt to break labor geography
into discrete categories, while useful in
organizing the book, is to some degree an
artifice. In fact, issues of scale, ideology,
and space as a political tool in the struggle
over the shape and nature of social rela-
tions are interrelated and co-dependent.
By bringing these elements of analysis
together, labor geographers might be
encouraged to also ask some larger ques-
tions about the future of the global econ-
omy and the possible role of working peo-
ple in uniting across their own racial,
gender, and spatial diversities in order to
challenge the fundamentalprecepts of eco-
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101
nomic organization at work in the world
today.
Rebecca A. Johns
University of South Florida
The Regional World: Territorial Develop-
ment in a Global Economy. By Michael
Storper. New York:Guilford, 1997.
Michael Storper has for some time been
one of the most innovative and powerful
thinkers in economic geography. His
recent volume arises from a concern for
"the principal dilemma of contemporary
economic geography-the resurgence of
regional economies and of territorial spe-
cialization in an age of increasing ease in
transportationand communication"(p. 21).
Such a view may be seen as a badly needed
response to trenchant critiques of the Los
Angeles or CaliforniaSchool of urban/eco-
nomic geography, whose prior focus upon
vertical integration or disintegration and
agglomeration economies largely ignored
the dynamicsof the internationaleconomy,
multinational firms, and increasingly
hypermobile capital.
Storper attempts to move away from the
rigid Fordism/post-Fordism dichotomy
that has underpinned much economic
geography over the last decade. He also
attempts to infuse overly structuralistinter-
pretations with a more sophisticated
understandingof decision making, the role
of culture, imperfect information, and the
like. His emphasis is primarilyupon reflex-
ivity, trust, learning, and the role of con-
ventions as shared expectations in the
negotiation of economic linkages. To
invoke these notions, he engages in a sus-
tained interrogation of evolutionary eco-
nomics, with the associated emphasis on
uncertainty and irreversibilityof economic
processes that makes necessary the use of
historical context in the explanation of
regional growth. Technological change, for
example, must be viewed in terms of the
suboptimal muddling of firms experiment-
ing with new techniques rather than as
some unproblematic standardizationof the
102 ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY
production process. Thus, rather than
abstract, universalizingtheories of regions,
Storper'sapproachcenters upon regions as
loci of untraded interdependencies, essen-
tially the intangible positive externalitiesof
agglomeration. Regional trajectories over
time-path dependence-reflect internal
returns to scale, stepwise increments in
locally specific tacit knowledge as well as
interregionaldiffusionof ideas. Much of the
latterpart of the book is concerned with the
local manifestation of global flows, includ-
ing world cities, urban consumers, and the
demographicdynamicsof urban labor mar-
kets. Thus, he argues (p. 181), "globalcapi-
talism is being constructedthroughinterac-
tions between flow economies and
territorial economies." In this sense, his
view represents a sort of transactionscost
analysisrun amok,with mixed results.
Storper is to be congratulated for
emphasizing the social embeddedness of
economic activities. Throughout, he is
insistent that a detailed understanding of
institutions, interpersonal relations, learn-
ing, asymmetric knowledge, uncertainty,
collective action, and path dependency
provides for a considerably richer under-
standing of the contingent nature of
regional growth than hitherto available.
However, his work does not carrythis argu-
ment far enough, and it is ultimately
unconvincing for this reason. People, for
Storper, are largely reduced to abstract
"actors"without class, ethnicity, or gender,
an ironic echo of earlier critiques of neo-
classical economics. For example, there is
no class struggle to be found in this book,
only the coordination of collective action.
Little is said about power, inequality, or
resistance. More broadly, this perspective
reveals an unwillingness to engage in dia-
logue with the broad community of geogra-
phers who have made the "interpretive
turn" so widely prevalent in the social sci-
ences, including those who draw upon cul-
tural studies to emphasize the creative
potential of human beings to remake their
worlds. Such a perspective is a necessary
corrective to the mechanistic reification of
economic activities that continues to
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plague economic geography, although
works such as Barnes's Logics of
Dislocation (1996) have helped to over-
come this deficiency.
This book is highly theoretical, occasion-
ally dry, and would have benefited from
more empirical examples. Storper does
mention Hollywood film production, the
fashion sector in France, and northern
Italy's small manufacturingfirms, but long
passages float by without concrete refer-
ents to the real world. Graduate students
will generally find this difficult reading.
Nonetheless, for those willing to plow
through its dense passages, Storper's book
offers a high degree of analytical sophisti-
cation.
Barney Warf
Florida State University
The Rural Landscape. By John Fraser
Hart. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998.
One of the greatest pleasures that formal
study of geography offers is the ability to
understand the human and physical com-
plexityof our planet, and the stage it sets for
daily life. Occasionally,a book appears that
synthesizes the human and physical dimen-
sions of geography's far-reaching subject
matter not only for geographers,but for the
layperson as well. The Rural Landscape is
such a book. It invites us to see both rural
areaswe knowwell and those we have never
exploredin new and enlightened ways. This
book may best be described as a handbook
or field guide. It distills the complex rural
economy and settlement pattern into easily
digested components, allowingus to under-
stand more clearlywhat we encounter when
we leave urban areasbehind.
No one is better suited to lead us into
the field than John Fraser Hart. He is a
master of field geography who has spent a
lifetime working his way out from the city's
edge and traversingtwo-lane roads through
the country,alwayswith a keen eye focused
on the surrounding landscape. Hart com-
plements his trained eye with a solid