Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an emerging body of critique of communicative planning theory (CPT). The critiques in the paper are grounded in analysis of situated planning practice in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, where planners were ‘feeling their way towards’ democratising planning practice in line with the normative dimensions of CPT. Two critiques are offered. Both are fundamentally concerned with power and the tendency of CPT to operate as if the workings of power can be temporarily suspended through communicative planning practice to produce new consensual planning discourses. First, it is argued that CPT pays insufficient attention to the practical context of power in which planning is practised, thereby assuming away, rather than engaging with, the politics-laden and power-laden interests that infiltrate planning practice. Second, it is argued that CPT abstracts planners from their positioning in a nexus of power, knowledge, and rationality which validates expert forms of knowing/reasoning/valuing, and thus underestimates the challenges of asserting alternative forms. The paper concludes with a suggestion that any theory aiming at the democratisation of planning practice will need to depart from an orientation to consensus, a defining feature of CPT, and instead account for the irreducible nature of power and difference.

Contemporary approaches to understanding the mechanisms determining local economic growth tend to be characterized by a dualism between ‘hard’ quantitative and mathematical models derived from economics and the ‘soft’ qualitative models of geographical theory. In this study, we contribute to a ‘third way’ of knowing that is based upon a theoretically informed econometric analysis of the ‘soft’ processes that are hypothesized to drive local economic growth. In this first of two papers, (part 1 of the study) we focus on questions of methodology and measurement. Specifically, six sets of theoretical propositions on the nature of the mechanisms that promote local economic performance are reviewed: the growth-pole, growth-centres model; the product-cycle model; the flexible-production model; the learning-regions model; the competitive-advantage model; and the enterprise-segmentation model. From this review, eight measurable dimensions are developed that cover the main propositions of these models. These dimensions are calibrated using data for Australia, divided into ninety-four regions, for the period 1984–92. We conclude by exploring the limitations of our mapping between theoretical concepts, measurable dimensions, and surrogate variables, and examine the implications of this mapping for testing the validity of ‘soft’ geographical theories. In a subsequent paper (part 2 of the study) we test the validity of these models of local growth in the Australian context.

An integrated approach to temporary migration in developing countries is proposed by linking past urban labour-force experience to postreturn entrepreneurial activities. The central argument is that labour migration is a family strategy to acquire both physical and human capital for a future technological transformation. On the basis of an in-depth survey of returned migrants that was conducted in rural China, I focus on the explanation of return rural occupation change in a multivariate framework. I find that it is the improvement of the migrant's skills and entrepreneurial ability rather than their savings and remittances that strongly facilitates a return rural occupational change. The policy implication of the finding is to shift efforts from narrowing intersectoral wage differentials to improving rural learning and training opportunities.

In this paper, I argue that the occupational attainment of female migrants in China has to be understood in its unique sociocultural and institutional contexts. In addition to the constraints of human capital, the patriarchal culture and the Household Registration (hukou) System greatly constrain the occupational attainment of female migrants. An empirical study based on a 1% sample of China's 1990 Census shows that female migrants are at a disadvantage in the labour market not only because of their gender but also because of their rural identities and outsider status, as defined by the hukou system. They can only attain jobs with lower prestige than their male counterparts, such as agricultural work and a few gender-stereotyped, family-related urban jobs.

This paper develops a new perspective to describe and account for the geography of trade in advanced services. The authors begin by acknowledging the national and global significance of trade in advanced services within national economic change and also global trade policy. They find current approaches to this issue, based on firm decisionmaking, are narrow, and seek out a broader perspective. The foundation for that perspective incorporates established research on the preconditions necessary for the growth of advanced services in a modern economy. The authors argue that the presence or absence of these preconditions in trading nations shapes the likelihood of service firms creating imports or exports of services. Hence the framework focuses on home-country and host-country conditions as explanatory factors of service trade. The framework is illustrated by an analysis of the trade in advanced services from Australia, especially with its northern Asia Pacific neighbours which now figure as the main destinations for Australia's goods trade. This analysis shows that Australia does have a well-developed advanced producer services sector, but only a small part of its trade involves these activities. The explanation is found in the lack of the appropriate host conditions in the markets that are important in its goods trade. That interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the United States and United Kingdom (with favourable host–market circumstances) remain much more important destinations for Australia's small advanced producer service export activity. A policy implication is that the long-term growth of Australia's service exports to its Asia-Pacific neighbours will depend upon institutional change within those markets.

It is well established that globalisation is associated with changing governmental conceptions of economic space. Whereas previously firms, regions, and economic sectors were understood as discrete parts of a national economy, they are now constituted as nodes in global economic flows and networks. However, less attention has been paid to the forms of expertise and knowledge practices through which the global economy has been constituted as the focus of economic governance. Through a case study of the New Zealand Call Centre Attraction Initiative, this paper draws from the governmentality literature to show new forms of economic governance can be conceptualised as an assemblage of spaces, subjects, strategies, and numbers. It is argued that far from being a ‘new reality’ globalisation is a governmental process in the making.

Sequence-alignment methods which have been recently introduced in time-use research analyse the cross-sectional as well as the sequential information embedded in space–time activity-diary data. As these methods have been developed to trace the evolutionary history of random mutations of the elements in biological sequences, they are not appropriate to measure the distances by which activities change their sequential order in activity diaries. In this paper we report on the development of a position-sensitive sequence-alignment method for activity analysis. First, the problem is specified, and the key concepts to analyse the problem are addressed. Then, the principles of the new method are introduced. The method is illustrated with data on activity patterns collected in the Netherlands. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of the basic assumptions of the method and avenues of future research are identified.

This study analyzes the differences between the spatial and temporal patterns of cholera and noncholera watery diarrhea in rural Bangladesh. Several characteristics were observed in the temporal distribution of 1273 cholera cases and 4984 noncholera watery diarrhea cases, revealing differences between the temporal patterns of the two disease categories. The main cholera peaks were in September and October in each of the three study years. There was an irregular temporal cycle to noncholera watery diarrhea. There were many small, highly dispersed high-risk areas for cholera. In contrast, the high-risk areas for noncholera are clustered in only a few areas. These findings are also consistent with the theory that cholera is a disease for which the spatial distribution is partly controlled by environmental parameters whereas noncholera disease transmission is controlled by other nonenvironmental parameters.

In the 1980s, the hegemony of the large US advertising networks has been challenged by a new breed of London-based agencies who pioneered what is known in the trade as ‘second wave’. On the one hand, second wave implied the emancipation of Soho from an ‘outpost of Madison Avenue’ to the ‘advertising village’ on the basis of momentous product and process innovations. On the other hand, a few London agencies rose to global top positions on the crest of the second wave by transforming themselves from international advertising networks into global communication groups. This paper starts from the assumption that both, the localised cluster of advertising agencies in the advertising village (the ‘Village’) and the global communications group (the ‘Group’), share basic principles of social organisation. It aims at demonstrating that the organisational logic of both the Village and the Group can be conceptualised in terms of a heterarchy. By drawing on case-study evidence from Soho on the one hand and from the world leading communications business, WPP, on the other, the five basic features of heterarchies—diversity, rivalry, tags, projects, and reflexivity—will provide the conceptual tools for the investigation into the social organisation of the Village and the Group.