Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

A comparison is made between the spread of protests in two contrasting types of rural society, one predominantly capitalist arable, the other small-farmer pastoral. The first saw series of protests by agricultural labourers in 1816, 1822, and 1830. The second saw a major scries of collective protests by small farmers, primarily over the issue of turnpike tolls, between 1842 and 1844, Of these four series, only the 1830 labourers' revolt showed clear spatial patterns of diffusion. Accounts of the resistance to the coup d'etat in France of 1851 give a further comparative perspective. As in France in 1851, for a massive mobilisation to occur in Britain in 1830, in a relatively short time span, there needed to be a major political crisis. The complex nature of the analysis offered here to account for the different patterns of spatial diffusion of the four series of protests should be a salutory warning against the glib explanations of the spread of the 1981 urban disorders in Britain.

The question of whether class or territory is the stronger basis of social mobilisation is examined. It is suggested that the economic problems being experienced by many older industrial areas can give rise to regional coalitions that seek to transcend class antagonisms in order to press for state investment to improve regional growth and employment prospects. But it is further argued that, because of the heterogeneity of the sociospatial base in such regions, supralocal coalitions will be vulnerable to the effects of allocative decisions favouring particular within-region locations. The notion of the vulnerability of regional social bases to the expression of local class interests is explored in the context of industrial South Wales. This region has been subject to successive attempts at economic revival, often in response to an apparently coherent regional voice pressing for state regional interventions. Important parts of various policies for restructuring the regional economy have been defeated in the past, precisely because of the impotence of regional coalitions to carry disadvantaged local class groupings along with them. On occasions, such local class groupings have been capable of mobilising popular support, indicating more the defensive than offensive nature of their power.

Arghiri Emmanuel's theory of unequal exchange is criticised for its inconsistent use of Marxian categories. An alternative theory is proposed, and interpreted, not as a single cause of uneven development, but as a contributory factor. It is more accurate to record unequal exchange as a process which keeps the rate of profit high in developed sectors of production than as a geographical transfer of value which speeds the rate of accumulation in certain areas. Empirical evidence, obtained by calculating labour values in different countries from input-output data, shows that unequal exchange is an extremely important process in terms of its magnitude. The evidence also suggests that the deviation of observed prices from prices of production may be a more important component of unequal exchange than the deviation of prices of production from values.

Incomplete information regarding the location of job offers, their contractual conditions, and tenure prospects typifies US labor markets. Crises of spatial coordination and the allocation of labor demand and supply, amongst other issues, are argued to result from such uncertainties. Assisted-mobility and spatial job-matching programs have been promoted as solutions to problems of inadequate information. These programs, however, ignore the fact that uncertainty is part of any rule-oriented exchange process. These programs also neglect the power relations between employers and employees which structure and sustain labor-market transaction costs. The crucial issue is the distribution of transaction costs between contracting parties. These principles are applied to a recent legal case in Michigan involving interregional labor migration.

An increasing number of jobs in the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso region is directly attributable to the growth of export-oriented manufacturing activity. These jobs, particularly those in Ciudad Juarez, tend to be at the bottom of the production hierarchy, low-skilled, and impermanent. Sectoral diversification in the regional labor market is being accompanied by homogenization of skills required for available jobs. Analysis of a survey of 1236 households in Ciudad Juárez indicates how they are responding to the changing character of labor demand. The households most directly affected by the industrialization process, those of the maquiladora or assembly-plant work force, arc compared with other types of households in the city. In addition, determinants of income in spatial sectors of the city are analyzed.

Tiebout's pure theory of local expenditures is analysed in terms of: (1) the theory of individual choice left implicit in the model; (2) the problems posed by the internal logic of the model; and (3) the inability of the model to explain patterns and events that we see. It is shown that the conception of equilibrium maintained by Tiebout cannot be sustained within the workings of reasonable adjustment mechanisms. A contextual argument is advanced to demonstrate the link between individual choice and the context of mobility, The implications of the Tiebout model and the proposed contextual theory of choice and mobility are both explored with respect to the equality of outcomes and public policy.

This is the first of a series of annual reports on books likely to be of interest to readers of Society and Space, which have been published in the year preceding the current volume of the journal The reports will not be exhaustive, but neither will they be random. Rather, what we have aimed for is to highlight the major contributions of the year and a sprinkling of other volumes which seem to have either potential importance or synoptic value. Two things need to be stressed. First, the inclusion of books in this report does not preclude their fuller review subsequently in the pages of the reviews section of the journal. Second, we are necessarily less familiar with the non-English-speaking literature. We hope to correct this bias by a series of short reports on literature originating from countries outside the English-speaking world. This report is divided into five sections—“Economy”, “State”, “Third World”, “Civil society”, and “Methodology and social theory”.