Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Flexible working has been widely advocated as a social panacea, capable of resolving unemployment, maintaining economic competitiveness, and enhancing equal opportunities between women and men. Flexibility has neutral or even positive connotations for both employers and employees. These meanings are differentiated, and empirically explored, by reference to the British component of a qualitative, comparative six-country European study of flexible working in the retail sector. Specific attention is paid to the determination of flexibility; for example whether it is employer led, employee chosen, or a complementary combination, and whether flexible working facilitates equal opportunities, both within the workplace and in the wider sense of promoting long-lasting changes in parental roles and responsibilities as specified under the European Union's mainstreaming initiative. It is concluded that the introduction of flexible working has opened up a whole range of possibilities for differential engagement in the workplace. However, these arrangements need to apply to all levels of the occupational hierarchy and similar arrangements need to be introduced in relation to caring if the officially stated objectives for greater equality of opportunity are to be realised. To bring about gender equity it is necessary to consider social reproduction as a whole and modify the division of labour between women and men within, and between, paid and unpaid work.

Geographers have recently argued that labour-market regulation interacts with market forces in profoundly different ways in different local labour markets. We illustrate this argument by using the case of the new statutory minimum wage in Britain. We consider whether the introduction of the national minimum wage represents a genuine departure from the preceding neoliberal labour-market regime, and examine how far it will begin to redress some of the pronounced geographical inequality in wages across local labour markets which developed under that regime. To provide comparative context, we examine the international geography of minimum wages and assess whether, and to what extent, the new UK minimum wage indicates a shift towards a new model of labour-market governance and regulation. We then review the geography of low pay in the United Kingdom and consider the possible geographical impact of the new national minimum wage. We argue that the effects of the minimum will vary depending on the nature of local labour-market characteristics. Then, perhaps most contentiously, the case is considered for regionally differentiating the minimum wage to reflect geographical differences in the cost of living. Finally, we examine the arguments for and against a single uniform national minimum in the light of administrative systems operated in other countries.

Within the context of rapid structural adjustment and the onslaught of neoliberal policies, this paper explores the varied trajectories and processes of employment restructuring in ‘postcommunist’ East-Central Europe. I first examine some of the comparative dimensions of employment and labour-market change in the region. The differential links between uneven employment loss and unemployment are explored to highlight the diverse national experiences of labour restructuring. I then go on to assess the links between employment restructuring and increasing nonparticipation in the labour market, again highlighting the importance of national differences which belie neoliberal notions of a unidimensional transition to capitalist employment relations. Having established the severity of the ‘employment shocks' across East-Central Europe, I then go on to examine the links between labour-market restructuring and emergent social inequality since 1989. The polarisation of employment opportunities and constraints provides a context for discussing the development of household economic practices that lie outside the ‘formal’, emergent capitalist economy. Through an exploration of a household data set for Bulgaria I examine the ways in which households in different labour-market positions have developed ‘strategies' that involve economic activities constituted outside of formal capitalist, market relations. On the basis of this analysis I argue that a theoretical space becomes opened, through which it is possible to situate household economic practices not solely as ‘responses' to the austerity of transition, but as constitutive of alternative sites of economic relations with their own autonomies and histories.

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 geographically uneven ways, differentially affecting various parts of the globe, there are three sets of general implications associated with them. First, the speed with which the consequences of economic and political events are transmitted through markets has increased dramatically during the past decades. Second, the rhetoric of neoliberal globalization is being used in an attempt to shift the balance of power to global capital. Third, the international migration of both work and people is likely to increase, the former fueled by Internet technologies effectively allowing global telecommuting, the latter fueled by falling birth rates in the industrial economies of the global North. I conclude with some observations about how workers and their organizations may respond to these developments.

Diverse and competing principles of equity are argued to be relevant to the burden-sharing problem for environmental improvement programmes. In this paper, a survey-based approach is used to reconcile this conflict, which is defined as sharing of the costs of an environmental programme among different individuals or groups. Respondents were asked to rank hypothetical individuals or groups on the basis of differences in relevant characteristic attributes. These attributes reflect the degree to which individuals are ‘responsible’ for the problem, ‘benefit’ from the policy change implemented, and are ‘able to pay’ for the programme. The econometric analysis of responses casts light on the magnitude of trade-offs between, for example, burden-sharing rules based on the polluter-pays principle and some of its alternatives. Our results indicate that these trade-offs do exist and, furthermore, are significant. Assessment of trade-offs in this way could be an important input into the design of mixed criteria rules for sharing burdens.

Structuration theory is applied to produce a typology of rules and resources that community representatives could use in their activism to keep open a facility slated for closure. This typology is compared with the rules and the resources that the community representatives used during a school-closure review in Essex County, Ontario, Canada, as inferred from a computerized content analysis of 138 letters published in the local daily newspaper. The community representatives' primary authoritative resource was their knowledge about the students' education and their communities. Their primary rules were the political ones for influencing the local and the provincial politicians. This structurationist interpretation clarifies the point that their community activism with these resources and rules did not solely explain the reprieve of the schools from closure.

The authors model retail rents in the United Kingdom with use of vector-autoregressive and time-series models. Two retail rent series are used, compiled by LaSalle Investment Management and CB Hillier Parker, and the emphasis is on forecasting. The results suggest that the use of the vector-autoregression and time-series models in this paper can pick up important features of the data that are useful for forecasting purposes. The relative forecasting performance of the models appears to be subject to the length of the forecast time-horizon. The results also show that the variables which were appropriate for inclusion in the vector-autoregression systems differ between the two rent series, suggesting that the structure of optimal models for predicting retail rents could be specific to the rent index used. Ex ante forecasts from our time-series suggest that both LaSalle Investment Management and CB Hillier Parker real retail rents will exhibit an annual growth rate above their long-term mean.

Much of the theoretical and policy debate on local labour markets has focused upon improving the educational, training, and other ‘supply-side’ characteristics of job seekers. However, complementary employer ‘demand-side’ factors, in particular the characteristics of employers, job openings, and recruitment practices, are also important in local labour markets but have been relatively neglected in the literature. The authors investigate such factors and argue that job vacancies in an environment of high unemployment are not only the result of traditional ‘structural’ or ‘skill mismatch between local labour markets, but may result from a mismatch between employer and job-seeker expectations combined with an asymmetry of information between these groups, resulting in ‘frictional mismatch’ within local labour markets. Skill shortages can therefore be seen as a subset of wider recruitment difficulties. The authors survey a sample of employers to examine their characteristics, vacancies, and recruitment practices. The results provide evidence on the importance of employer and job factors on the flow of people into job vacancies. They also indicate that certain recruitment practices and inherent characteristics of vacancies and employers result in job offers that are either unattractive or inaccessible to the unemployed and hence increase the duration of job vacancies. It is argued that research into and design of local labour-market policies need to take more explicit account of the employer and job characteristics when discussing skill mismatch.

We investigate the properties of two tests for origin dependence in the semi-Markov process. Although several authors have discussed tests for destination dependence, tests for the equally important origin dependence have been ignored. The properties of the test statistics under the null hypothesis of no origin dependence are examined by means of a simulation study. The use of these tests is illustrated by an application to residential tenure data from the British Household Panel Survey.

Indicators are increasingly used in the allocation of resources in addressing problems of disadvantage. The most commonly used indicators have generally been developed in relation to urban problems and there is a concern that this fails to reveal problems as experienced in rural areas. Many of the indicators that might be used are ambiguous and there appear to be few single indicators that adequately capture the complex nature of the problems facing people living in rural areas. An alternative approach is proposed, involving the development of bundles of indicators that are defined around notional numbers of people living in particular sets of circumstances relating, for example, to employment, service provision, and access to housing. A number of bundles are suggested and illustrative results are presented for three counties. Analysis illustrates how the results may be used to compare the incidence of disadvantage between urban and rural areas, the concentration of disadvantage within rural areas, and the relationships between the various types of disadvantage. The approach has potential both for analysing the incidence of rural disadvantage and as a basis for the allocation of rural development assistance.