M Webber
Biographic Data
| ID | 12731 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Webber |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Webber |
| SIGNATURE | WEBBER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7697-3453 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 109 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 586 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 109 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Marx as a guide for a critical geographer
This paper provides an account of my intellectual journey. Beginning with an un-theorised concern with inequality, this journey has taken me through jousts with statistical models of social systems to theoretical and empirical investigations of primitive accumulation, capitalist dynamics and human–nature interactions. Marx has played an essential role in this intellectual journey, though increasingly his insights have been supplemented by other t…
Class and Power in the New Deal: Corporate Moderates, Southern Democrats, and the Liberal-Labor Coalition
This book provides a new perspective on the origins of the three most important New Deal policies—the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act—while examining the strengths and weaknesses of historical institutionalism, Marxism, protest-disruption theory, and non-Marxian class-dominance theory
Authoritarian neoliberalization of water governance: The case of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project
China’s water governance not only involves highly technical interventions from the government but also reflects selected features of neoliberalization. Market and government interventions coexist, making the notion of ‘authoritarian neoliberalization’ a useful vantage point from which to understand water governance in China. The paper assesses the practices of water governance from the perspective of authoritarian neoliberalization by using the c…
Extending the China water machine: Constructing a dam export industry
From Chinese dam building in Africa to the Belt and Road Initiative: Assembling infrastructure projects and their linkages
An integrated assessment of China's South-North Water Transfer Project
China's South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP) is a vast and still expanding network of infrastructure and institutions that moves water from the Yangtze River and its tributaries to cities in North China. This article aims to assess the SNWTP's impacts by beginning to answer seven questions about the project: How is the management of the SNWTP evolving? What are the problems to be resolved when managing SNWTP water within jurisdictions? What…
G J (Geoff) Missen
Beyond contradiction: The state and the market in contemporary Chinese water governance
Governance rescaling and neoliberalization of China's water governance: The case of China's South-North Water Transfer Project
This paper explores the relationship between rescaling and the neoliberalization of water governance in the South-North Water Transfer Project. It demonstrates that the Chinese government has selectively adopted some neoliberal tools while rejecting others and dismissing the ideology of neoliberalism. These elements of neoliberalism are sometimes associated with the rescaling of water governance upward, downward, outward and inward. Rescaling has…
Inequality
Inequality in geography refers to differences in wellbeing, health, income, wealth, or social status. There is a huge variety of indicators of these variables and of measures of inequality in them. This variety, together with political interests in the outcomes of studies of inequality, means that much research about inequality is highly disputed. At a global level, income inequality between individuals is high but has been stable in the past 20 …
Trust and the risk of consuming polluted water in Shanghai, China
It is commonly understood that political trust reduces public perceptions of various kinds of risk. However, this knowledge largely comes from research conducted in liberal democratic states, and so may have little explanatory power in China. Though it has an authoritarian government, China has enjoyed relatively high levels of political trust, and so is a unique case from which to advance knowledge about political trust and risk perception. We d…
The South–North Water Transfer Project: Remaking the geography of China
The South–North Water Transfer Project: remaking the geography of China. Regional Studies. This paper uses a technopolitical approach to analyse China’s South–North Water Transfer Project. The project promises to channel 25 billion cubic metres of water a year from the Yangtze River northward, connecting four river basins, three megacities, six provinces and hundreds of millions of water users. The paper argues that the project embodies a particu…
Of maps and eating bitterness: The politics of scaling in China's South-North Water Transfer Project
Corporations, Governments, and Socioenvironmental Policy in China: China's Water Machine as Assemblage
The standard approach to China's environmental management, fragmented authoritarianism, assumes the existence of state, corporations, farmers, and consumers. New social actors now populate the Chinese landscape, however. One such actor is the network we call the China water machine; others comprise the networks and coalitions that oppose the China water machine's operations. These actors play out their operations and conflicts within socioenviron…
Governmentality and the conduct of water: China's South–North Water Transfer Project
Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer ( SNWT ) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through …
Market power and the rate of profit
Honest and Useful: The Post-Institutional Lives of Refuge for the Destitute Beneficiaries
The Refuge for the Destitute, a charitable reformatory in London, aimed to transform juvenile delinquents into ‘honest and useful’ citizens through institutionalization, moral instruction, and occupational training. While historians have dwelled on Refuge beneficiaries’ lives before and during their stay in the institution, only minimal attention has been paid to their subsequent progress. As a result, very little is known about the success of th…
Constructing Water Shortages on a Huge River: The Case of Shanghai
Shanghai is located on the world's third largest river (by volume). Yet it faces the risk of shortages of drinking water. Many decisions and environmental characteristics have contributed to this threat. First, Shanghai has become dependent on water brought into the municipality by rivers. Second, it has become increasingly reliant on water from the Changjiang (Yangzi River), principally in order to control the levels of pollution in the water th…
What can we learn from the practice of development-forced displacement and resettlement for organised resettlements in response to climate change
New corporate Uyghur entrepreneurs in Urumqi, China
Although China's Uyghurs have progressively engaged in informal trade following economic reforms, in recent years a small group of corporate Uyghur entrepreneurs have positioned themselves in more formal industries where they hold a cultural advantage. However, we argue that the clustering of firms and a lack of experience and capital limits entrepreneurs' ability to compete with established Han businesses. This restricts Uyghur economic particip…
The Political Economy of the Three Gorges Project
This paper examines the debates over the decision to build the Three Gorges Dam, the subsequent flows of income to the firms involved in its construction, and the continuing implications of the dam for the Chinese space economy. The paper makes and justifies three claims. First, the construction project has been responsible for both dispossession and the formation of capital (primitive accumulation). But it is too simple to interpret the project …
The Dynamics of Primitive Accumulation: With Application to Rural China
The author examines the dynamics of primitive accumulation through market-based competition for factors of production. Although much existing analysis of primitive accumulation focuses on accumulation through dispossession, in fact, competition in factor markets is one of the two principal means of primitive accumulation in rural China. A model of market-based interaction between capitalist and noncapitalist production is estimated with data from…
Involuntary Rural Resettlement: Resources, Strategies, and Outcomes at the Three Gorges Dam, China
This article analyses the effects of resettlement on farming households in two villages within the area inundated by the Three Gorges Dam, China. The article also proposes a political-economic framework within which to understand the resettlement program and its implications for households. The households brought a variety of resources into the resettlement—land, savings, their labor, social ties, and communal resources—resources that became less…
Emergy evaluation perspectives of an irrigation improvement project proposal in China
Development for Whom? Rural to Urban Resettlement at the Three Gorges Dam, China
When farmers are dispossessed of their lands to make way for a development project it is often inevitable that there will not be enough land to go around. It is unlikely that parcels of fertile land are lying vacant in the surrounding areas awaiting distribution. It therefore becomes necessary for people who previously derived their livelihoods from the land to move into cities. This research explores what happens to a sample of such people and w…
What can we learn from the practice of development-forced displacement and resettlement for organised resettlements in response to climate change
Accommodating Migration To Promote Adaptation To Climate Change
No AccessPolicy Research Working Papers22 Jun 2013Accommodating Migration To Promote Adaptation To Climate ChangeAuthors/Editors: Michael Webber, Jon BarnettMichael Webber, Jon Barnetthttps://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-5270SectionsAboutPDF (0.2 MB) ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract:This paper explains how climate change may increase future migration, and which risks are associated with su…
Involuntary Resettlement, Production and Income: Evidence from Xiaolangdi, PRC
Development for Whom? Rural to Urban Resettlement at the Three Gorges Dam, China
When farmers are dispossessed of their lands to make way for a development project it is often inevitable that there will not be enough land to go around. It is unlikely that parcels of fertile land are lying vacant in the surrounding areas awaiting distribution. It therefore becomes necessary for people who previously derived their livelihoods from the land to move into cities. This research explores what happens to a sample of such people and w…
Involuntary Resettlement as an Opportunity for Development: The Case of Urban Resettlers of the Three Gorges Project, China
Journal Article Involuntary Resettlement as an Opportunity for Development: The Case of Urban Resettlers of the Three Gorges Project, China Get access Brooke Mcdonald, Brooke Mcdonald School of Social and Environmental Enquiry, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Michael Webber, Michael Webber School of Social and Environmental Enquiry, University of Melbourne,…
Governmentality and the conduct of water: China's South–North Water Transfer Project
Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer ( SNWT ) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through …
The South–North Water Transfer Project: Remaking the geography of China
The South–North Water Transfer Project: remaking the geography of China. Regional Studies. This paper uses a technopolitical approach to analyse China’s South–North Water Transfer Project. The project promises to channel 25 billion cubic metres of water a year from the Yangtze River northward, connecting four river basins, three megacities, six provinces and hundreds of millions of water users. The paper argues that the project embodies a particu…
From Chinese dam building in Africa to the Belt and Road Initiative: Assembling infrastructure projects and their linkages
The Places of Primitive Accumulation in Rural China
Rural" is a category of enduring significance in China. The trajectories of social change in China's rural areas reflect local dynamics and new forms of economy that encroach from local or distant cities and international sources. One indicator of change is the separation of people from their means of production: the development of the preconditions for capitalist production. Using information from villages scattered across China, this article id…
The Contemporary Transition
In this paper six attempts to periodise economic life are distinguished-those due to Gibson and Horvath, Kleinknecht, Lash and Urry, Lipietz, Mandel, and Piore and Sabel. The aspects of the economy that they analyse, the type of period they describe, the spaces associated with the periods, and the processes of transition are contrasted. The theories differently explain the economic slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s, and crucial distinctions are: wh…
Quantitative Measurement of Some Marxist Categories
In this paper the theoretical and methodological requirements for the measurement of Marxist categories are examined. After a brief introduction to the Marxist theory of value, it is claimed that labour must be the standard of commodities; the meaning of social necessity is explained, the methods of treating skilled and heterogeneous labour illustrated, and productive labour defined. It is then shown how value is measured, when there is joint pro…
The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization
Finance and the real economy: Theoretical implications of the financial crisis in Asia
Corporations, Governments, and Socioenvironmental Policy in China: China's Water Machine as Assemblage
The standard approach to China's environmental management, fragmented authoritarianism, assumes the existence of state, corporations, farmers, and consumers. New social actors now populate the Chinese landscape, however. One such actor is the network we call the China water machine; others comprise the networks and coalitions that oppose the China water machine's operations. These actors play out their operations and conflicts within socioenviron…
Empirical Research in Scientific Human Geography
Beyond contradiction: The state and the market in contemporary Chinese water governance
Technical Changes and the Rate of Profit in the Canadian Food Industry
The rate of profit and the causes of changes in the rate of profit in the Canadian food and beverage industry, for the years 1952-1981, are examined in this paper. Until the mid-1960s, the rate of profit was stable or rising, but since then it has fallen. In the first half of the period under consideration, the market strength of the food and beverage industry offset the negative effects of changes within the industry; in the second half of the p…
Periodic Markets: An Economic Location Analysis
(1973). Periodic Markets: An Economic Location Analysis. Economic Geography: Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 213-227
Rates of Profit and Interregional Flows of Capital
This paper investigates the flows of capital in a model of an economy that has two regions. Technology is fixed and independent of scale. Investment is controlled partly by individual firms and partly by central financial institutions. In both cases, investment is divided between regions in a ratio that depends on the rate of profit earned in them. The system has a unique equilibrium growth path. The central conclusion of the model is that even i…
Agglomeration and the Regional Question
Trust and the risk of consuming polluted water in Shanghai, China
It is commonly understood that political trust reduces public perceptions of various kinds of risk. However, this knowledge largely comes from research conducted in liberal democratic states, and so may have little explanatory power in China. Though it has an authoritarian government, China has enjoyed relatively high levels of political trust, and so is a unique case from which to advance knowledge about political trust and risk perception. We d…
The Political Economy of the Three Gorges Project
This paper examines the debates over the decision to build the Three Gorges Dam, the subsequent flows of income to the firms involved in its construction, and the continuing implications of the dam for the Chinese space economy. The paper makes and justifies three claims. First, the construction project has been responsible for both dispossession and the formation of capital (primitive accumulation). But it is too simple to interpret the project …
Pricing China's irrigation water
Trade and inequality: Australia's textile, clothing, and footwear industries, 1986-1996
Beginning in the mid 1980s, the Australian government cut protection of the Australian textile, clothing, and footwear sector, while the global TCF industry was embracing a new form of organization, the commodity chain. Some Australian TCF producers were forced out of business, but others followed a variety of strategies, thereby restructuring the TCF labour force. In a process structured by age, gender, and ethnicity, skilled and semi‐skilled pr…
The Measurement of Unequal Exchange
Unequal exchange is the deviation of the prices of commodities from their values that results from intersectoral profit equalisation and from institutional barriers. Its magnitude is measured in this paper. The method of calculating unequal exchange from input-output tables is outlined, then the results are presented. The results show that, if commodities produced in the Philippines in 1961 had sold at the same price-value ratio as did commoditie…
Sub‐optimal Behaviour and the Concept of Maximum Profits in Location Theory
Some aspects of the South Australian Urban system: Some observations
Some aspects of the South Australian Urban system." Australian Geographer, 11(4), pp. 390–391
Spatial and Temporal Variations in Short Term Industrial Change Within Cities
Spatial and Temporal Variations in Short Term Industrial Change: Reply
The Growth of the Firm within the City
Equilibrium of Location in an Isolated State
This paper presents a model of the location of agricultural production. The price of output, the location of production, and the density of population are determined by the assumption of an equilibrium of exchange between the city service industry and its surrounding agricultural hinterland. The demand and supply of transport and the allocation of population to urban and rural occupations are also determined within the model
Impact of Uncertainty on Location
Periodic Markets: An Economic Location Analysis
(1973). Periodic Markets: An Economic Location Analysis. Economic Geography: Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 213-227
Free Entry and the Locational Equilibrium∗
Locational phenomena are examined under the assumption that firms have perfect foresight. In the short run, competitive and cooperative price equilibria may be found; the competitive solution is equivalent to Hotelling's duopolistic equilibrium. In the medium term, prices are set as a function of location patterns, such that profits equal zero. In the long run, the assumptions of free entry and perfect foresight do not yield unique locational equ…
Complex Periodic Market Cycles∗
Market cycles are conceptualized from the viewpoint of users. Distinctions are made between part-time and full-time traders, number of market days in a market week, location of the trader, routes used to frequent markets, the order of the good, and short-term changes in supply and demand. A number of complex market cycle types are identified with the aid of graph theoretic notions. Ecological complementarity within a market cycle framework is mea…
Entropy-Maximising Location Models for Nonindependent Events
This paper presents two kinds of entropy-maximising location model for situations in which there exist two classes of individual. In one class of model, sampling is with replacement; in the second, sampling is without replacement. These problems are solved, and interpreted as describing the distribution of items and the component classes of items by distance, size, or time. The paper emphasises methods of obtaining complete solutions to each mode…
Toward a Cognitive Spatial Theory
Our knowledge of the external world impinges upon our actions, and our acts affect our knowledge. The relationship between behavior and knowledge is mutual or circular, and exceedingly complex. In this paper we simplify and compartmentalize this mutual relationship and focus particularly on the elementary observation that where one lives, where one travels, and what one does affects what one knows of and understands about the world. In what way c…
Entropy‐maximizing Models for the Distribution of “Expenditures”
Entropy-maximizing models for the distribution of “expenditures”
Elementary Entropy Maximizing Probability Distributions: Analysis and Interpretation
This paper presents complete solutions to some entropy maximizing problems. It is required to estimate the probability pi that some item falls in class i where there is associated with each class a measure x. The distribution of probabilities is such as to maximize entropy. The paper presents methods of determining the Lagrangian multipliers which arise in the maximization process and of estimating the parameters of the resulting probability dist…
An elementary entropy-maximizing model of urban consumers
An Elementary Entropy‐maximizing Model of Urban Consumers
Pedagogy Again: What Is Entropy?∗
Entropy maximizing methods are popular in geography, civil engineering, and planning, but are not easy for nonspecialists to understand. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty. A reasonable means of constructing models is to maximize uncertainty subject to the information which is given because this minimizes the observer's bias. The nature of the constraints, or given information, is important. Results provided by the entropy maximizing method are …
Information Theory: Some Concepts and Measures
The concepts of entropy and of information are increasingly used in spatial analysis. This paper analyses these ideas in order to show how measures of spatial distributions may be constructed from them. First, the information content of messages is examined and related to the notion of uncertainty. Then three information measures, due to Shannon, Brillouin, and Good, are derived and shown to be appropriate in analysing different spatial problems;…
Spatial Diffusion Processes 1: A Model and an Approximation Method
This paper describes a model of the diffusion of a message among the cities of a system. The diffusion process depends upon the flow of information about the message from prior adopters. Two cases are identified: (1) in which adopters are individuals within cities, so that information relevant to adoption may flow from adopters in one city to other individuals in that city, and (2) in which the city is the adopting unit, so that information relev…
Spatial Diffusion Processes 2: Numerical Analysis
An earlier paper (Webber and Joseph, 1978) proposed a model of the process whereby messages diffuse between a system of cities and provided a means of approximating the solution to that model if cities can ‘self-infect’ themselves with the message. This paper continues the analysis of this model by investigating the case in which a city cannot send the message to itself. The analysis is numerical, and an alternative to Monte Carlo simulation is u…
Literature for Teaching Quantitative Geography: Technique by, for, but Not of Geographers
This paper develops some criteria by which the teaching of quantitative geography to undergraduate students may be judged. The criteria are used to evaluate two series of booklets which are intended for use in quantitative geography
Location of Manufacturing Activity in Cities
This paper offers a theoretical interpretation of the evolution of the pattern of manufacturing location within cities. First, it explains the concentration of location around the center and the transport modes of 19th century cities by using Weber's theory of the location of competitive industries. A variety of empirical evidence about the 20th-century dispersal of manufacturing is reviewed. This dispersal is then interpreted as a consequence of…
Agglomeration and the Regional Question
Unequal Exchange and Uneven Development
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 ce…
Economics (71 works) · Political science (51 works) · Geography (39 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Business (34 works) · China (27 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (23 works) · Economy (22 works)