Sally A Weller
Biographic Data
| ID | 72996 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sally A Weller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sally A |
| FAMILY NAME | Weller |
| SIGNATURE | WELLER S A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2791-5687 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 253 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Just transitions in the Australian automotive sector
The closure of the Australian passenger vehicle industry in 2017 ended an important phase in the nation’s economic history. Closure affected up to 100, 000 employees working across the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and the supply chain, with the impacts concentrated in two Australian states. This paper examines both the processes and the outcomes of this closure, making use of a Just Transitions lens to assess the wider impacts of this …
Place-based just transition: Domains, components and costs
The transition from fossil fuels involves the closing down of fossil-fuel based plants and activities, such as coal mines and coal fired power stations. This article outlines the components of a place-based Just Transition in which the management of closures extends spatially, beyond the usual focus on affected workers, to deliver interventions across affected communities with a view to minimising adverse impacts, creating new local opportunities…
Greensill Capital and the securitisation of supply chain financing
The non-bank financial institution Greensill Capital pioneered platform-based supply chain financing and the securitisation of supply chain debt, then controversially extended the business to lending funds to firms in the productive economy based on anticipated future invoices. By rolling over these supposedly short-term and liquid loans, this mechanism provided unsecured long-term funding to risky businesses. The article examines how regulatory …
Left-behind neighbourhoods in old industrial regions
This article focuses on the neighbourhoods and people that have been left behind in the economic transformation of two now-diversified old industrial regions: Geelong (Victoria) in Australia and Oshawa (Ontario) in Canada. Political discontent has found expression in different ways in the two locations. This, we contend, reflects policy frameworks that dampen the extent to which socio-spatial inequality and entrenched disadvantage generate discon…
Regional assets and value capture trajectories: The growth and demise of an Australian automotive supplier
This article examines the relationship between regional assets and value capture with a focus on knowledge and intellectual property assets. It traces, over an extended time horizon, the upgrading and later downgrading path of a single supplier firm in a peripheral location to illuminate the degree to which value capture trajectories are shaped by the power geometries of regional, network, and macroeconomic forces. The analysis suggests that func…
State structures and the limits of agency: Governing the transformation from coal in Australia
To what extent do subnational differences in the configurations of formal and informal institutions shape the relative capacities of state and regional agents? This article considers the distribution of capacities and powers among regional actors, as defined by their organizational roles and the power of the state. After comparing the management of economic change in two peripherally located and coal-dependent areas in different States in Austral…
Plant closures in Australia’s automotive industry: Continuity and Change
This paper explores the possibility of using diachronic case study comparisons to shed light on continuity and change in policy interventions to manage plant closures. It compares the early results of a survey of workers retrenched in the 2017 closure of Australia’s passenger vehicle manufacturing industry with the results of a similar survey of workers who lost their jobs in the 2005 closure of Mitsubishi’s Adelaide engine-casting and components…
Not so "smart"? An Australian experiment in smart specialisation
This article explores the utility of applying the European policy of smart specialisation to tackle spatial divergence in the Australian context. Using a geographical political economy approach and considering a growing literature on innovation in peripheral places, the work explores how smart specialisation is applied in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, a coal-dependent non-metropolitan industrial enclave in the Gippsland region. Analysis of the case …
Places that matter: Australia’s crisis intervention framework and voter response
This article contributes to understandings of geographies of discontent by focusing on the way that political frameworks condition the demand for fringe or protest voting. It discusses how Australia’s federal political framework, preferential voting system and timely crisis intervention policies combine to reduce the demand for fringe voting. The local effects of this system are illustrated via an examination of voting patterns in two disadvantag…
The politicization of research methods, illustrated in the case of plant closures
This paper contributes to building better methods in economic geography by examining the coevolution of theory, methodology, and should read methodology, and the practice of research methods with the policy context. The paper suggests that debates about how economic geography defines its theoretical and methodological boundaries have not been sufficiently cognizant of the effects of policy engagement. It posits that the politicized contemporary c…
Becoming Precarious? Precarious Work and Life Trajectories After Retrenchment
Much of the large literature on precarious work has largely tended to assume that precarity is shaped by job quality: that precarious work leads to precarious lives. This paper adds to the literature by questioning this line of causality and highlighting the broader range of influences shaping the lives of older workers who enter precarious work after retrenchment from secure, long-term careers. Drawing on a study of Australia's automotive manufa…
M elbourne
Melbourne is a cosmopolitan and multicultural city in the southeastern state of Victoria, Australia. The city has grown rapidly in recent years, with accelerated migration and growth in the number of international students studying in the city, producing challenges for housing, liveability, and employment. The recent closure of automobile manufacturing plants is testing the city's resilience.
The urban and regional impacts of plant closures: New Methods and Perspectives
Work on large-scale plant closures has provided a rich vein of scholarship and academic debate. This paper articulates a new set of methods and concepts for understanding how large-scale redundancies associated with the closure of manufacturing plants affects society and the economy at the local, regional and national scales. It posits the need for a more comprehensive exercise in data collection and experimentation with previously unused methods…
What is to be done? Reflections on Brian Palmer’s ‘Approaching Working-Class History as Struggle’
Just transition? Strategic framing and the challenges facing coal dependent communities
Policies designed to hasten the closure of high-emissions coal-fired power stations routinely include reference to the need for a ‘just’ transition in affected communities. But the detail of what a just transition might entail is rarely specified. This article examines how policy interventions in Australia in 2012–2013, as part of the Gillard government’s Clean Energy Future package, approached the problem of a just transition in the case of Vict…
Globalisation, marketisation and the transformation of Australia’s electricity sector
Following the style of analysis of Fagan and Webber’s Global Restructuring, this paper examines the marketisation, privatisation and globalisation of Australia’s electricity generation and transmission sectors. This paper shows how, in Australia’s spatially dispersed and politically fragmented space-economy, marketisation and privatisation policies tend to produce oligopolistic industries with the capacity to thwart market-based regulation. A cas…
Evidence in the Networked Governance of Regional Decarbonisation: A Critical Appraisal
This paper examines the use of evidence in collaborative policy making focusing on the challenges of implementing national decarbonisation policies in regional areas. Its case study of a staged policy intervention to promote the ‘transition to a low carbon economy’ in Victoria's coal‐dependent Latrobe Valley reveals the selective use of evidence to support policy directions that emerged from the interaction of policy knowledge and the political m…
Fast Parallels? Contesting Mobile Policy Technologies
This article extends recent examinations of incomplete or disrupted policy mobility by examining the politically volatile case of policies to manage the regional impacts of decarbonization in Australia. The article's extended case study shows how political interests differently incorporated figments of circulating policy into longstanding debates and how more-than-local political networks defeated an antipolitical, technocratic exercise in 'new r…
Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding
Series Editor Preface viii Acknowledgements ix Permissions x List of Tables xi List of Figures xii 1 Introduction 1 2 The Geographies of Brands and Branding 23 3 Origination 59 4 Local Origination Newcastle Brown Ale 88 5 National Origination Burberry 112 6 Global Origination Apple 139 7 Territorial Development 171 8 Conclusions 194 References 207 Index 224
Accounting for Skill Shortages? Migration and the Australian Labour Market
Although recent circumstances have rekindled interest in matching skilled migrant intakes to domestic labour needs, the factors contributing to migrant employment outcomes remain poorly understood. Contemporary research tends to focus on the best and worst of skilled migrant outcomes – either integration into elite transnational labour markets or relegation to relatively menial work. By approaching the issue from a perspective attuned to differen…
Actually existing political economies
In this response, we are prompted by the commentaries to discuss three issues: the need to be wary of malleability in the definitions of keywords like neoliberalism; the importance in economic geography of close study of the national scale and the relationships among state policies, economies, societies and national developmental trajectories; and the concern we have about the assumed political utility of the idea of neoliberalism now that its us…
An argument with neoliberalism: Australia’s place in a global imaginary
This article argues that the uncritical application of the lens of neoliberalism closes off opportunities for more rigorous analysis of actually existing socio-economic change. We ask whether Australia’s developmental trajectory over the last three decades can be described as neoliberalization and whether the outcome is a variety of neoliberalism. Instead of stitching together a story about variegated neoliberalism, we find an alternative narrati…
De-industrialisation, financialisation and Australia's macro-economic trap
The seemingly inexorable decline of manufacturing in Australia is typically explained by firm-level competitiveness, especially labour costs, the challenges posed by a peripheral location, and the (Dutch disease) effects of Australia's mining boom. We argue that such explanations are insufficient, and look instead to the way that processes of financialisation and the policy settings of other countries combine to inflate the value of the Australia…
To What Extent has Australia's Development Trajectory Been Neoliberalist
Our account of Australia's economic trajectory over the last four decades highlights the play of tensions, contradictions and imperfect resolutions. We see Australia's political economy as shaped by tensions between the opposed needs and demands of inward- and outward-looking sectors, regions and interests, and irresolvably-different understandings of Australia's past and visions of Australia's future. We show how Australia's spatially fragmented…
Creativity or costs? Questioning New Zealand's fashion success: A methodological intervention
This paper questions the proposition that creativity-led cultural industries can prosper in peripheral locations. To that end, it examines the apparent success of New Zealand's designer fashion industry in the first years of the twenty-first century. The paper critiques the conclusion that New Zealand's fashion success was the outcome of national industry policies that nurtured and promoted place-based creative talent. It also critiques the micro…
An argument with neoliberalism: Australia’s place in a global imaginary
This article argues that the uncritical application of the lens of neoliberalism closes off opportunities for more rigorous analysis of actually existing socio-economic change. We ask whether Australia’s developmental trajectory over the last three decades can be described as neoliberalization and whether the outcome is a variety of neoliberalism. Instead of stitching together a story about variegated neoliberalism, we find an alternative narrati…
Fashion as viscous knowledge: Fashion's Role in Shaping Trans-National Garment Production
This article develops a perspective of fashion as a complex, multi-dimensional form of knowledge and as a technology of garment mass production. It identifies the various modalities of fashion knowledge and characterises their different rates and extents of transmission across space and time in terms of their relative complexity. The article explores the spatio-temporal configurations of fashion knowledge as it is mobilised in the economy, interr…
Discrimination, labour markets and the labour market prospects of older workers: What Can a Legal Case Teach Us
As governments become increasingly concerned about the fiscal implications of the ageing population, labour market policies have sought to encourage mature workers to remain in the labour force. The 'human capital' discourses motivating these policies rest on the assumption that older workers armed with motivation and vocational skills will be able to return to fulfilling work. This article uses the post-redundancy recruitment experiences of form…
State structures and the limits of agency: Governing the transformation from coal in Australia
To what extent do subnational differences in the configurations of formal and informal institutions shape the relative capacities of state and regional agents? This article considers the distribution of capacities and powers among regional actors, as defined by their organizational roles and the power of the state. After comparing the management of economic change in two peripherally located and coal-dependent areas in different States in Austral…
Place-based just transition: Domains, components and costs
The transition from fossil fuels involves the closing down of fossil-fuel based plants and activities, such as coal mines and coal fired power stations. This article outlines the components of a place-based Just Transition in which the management of closures extends spatially, beyond the usual focus on affected workers, to deliver interventions across affected communities with a view to minimising adverse impacts, creating new local opportunities…
Financial stress and the long-term outcomes of job loss
This article examines the longer-term effects of job loss for middle income households in Australia. Specifically, it analyses the experiences of workers who lost their jobs in the 2001 collapse of an Australian airline, Ansett Airlines. Since Ansett employees' savings were tied up in the Ansett corporate structure, its workers faced the double jeopardy of losing both their careers and their savings. The article illuminates the role of financial …
The urban and regional impacts of plant closures: New Methods and Perspectives
Work on large-scale plant closures has provided a rich vein of scholarship and academic debate. This paper articulates a new set of methods and concepts for understanding how large-scale redundancies associated with the closure of manufacturing plants affects society and the economy at the local, regional and national scales. It posits the need for a more comprehensive exercise in data collection and experimentation with previously unused methods…
Left-behind neighbourhoods in old industrial regions
This article focuses on the neighbourhoods and people that have been left behind in the economic transformation of two now-diversified old industrial regions: Geelong (Victoria) in Australia and Oshawa (Ontario) in Canada. Political discontent has found expression in different ways in the two locations. This, we contend, reflects policy frameworks that dampen the extent to which socio-spatial inequality and entrenched disadvantage generate discon…
Just transition? Strategic framing and the challenges facing coal dependent communities
Policies designed to hasten the closure of high-emissions coal-fired power stations routinely include reference to the need for a ‘just’ transition in affected communities. But the detail of what a just transition might entail is rarely specified. This article examines how policy interventions in Australia in 2012–2013, as part of the Gillard government’s Clean Energy Future package, approached the problem of a just transition in the case of Vict…
The Regional Dimensions of the ‘Transition to a Low-carbon Economy’: The Case of Australia's Latrobe Valley
Weller S. The regional dimensions of the ‘transition to a low-carbon economy’: the case of Australia's Latrobe Valley, Regional Studies. Translating concern about climate change into practical, effective and politically feasible policy action is a key challenge for contemporary governments. In Australia, the government's failure to launch ‘the transition to a low-carbon economy’ is reshaping the political landscape. This article argues that progr…
Shifting spatialities of power: The case of Australasian aviation
Power and Scale: The Shifting Geography of Industrial Relations Law in Australia
In an increasingly complex literature exploring the geographies of socially constructed scale, interest has focused on the relationship between scale, power and the contested political terrains through which these relations are played out. In this paper, I argue that these interactions must be understood in specific contexts, where shifts in scale are inextricably linked to shifts in the sources and instruments of power. By applying a scale persp…
Plant closures in Australia’s automotive industry: Continuity and Change
This paper explores the possibility of using diachronic case study comparisons to shed light on continuity and change in policy interventions to manage plant closures. It compares the early results of a survey of workers retrenched in the 2017 closure of Australia’s passenger vehicle manufacturing industry with the results of a similar survey of workers who lost their jobs in the 2005 closure of Mitsubishi’s Adelaide engine-casting and components…
Creativity or costs? Questioning New Zealand's fashion success: A methodological intervention
This paper questions the proposition that creativity-led cultural industries can prosper in peripheral locations. To that end, it examines the apparent success of New Zealand's designer fashion industry in the first years of the twenty-first century. The paper critiques the conclusion that New Zealand's fashion success was the outcome of national industry policies that nurtured and promoted place-based creative talent. It also critiques the micro…
Are Labour Markets Necessarily 'Local'? Spatiality, Segmentation and Scale
This paper draws on recent debates about scale to approach the geography of labour markets from a dynamic perspective sensitive to the spatiality and scale of labour market restructuring. Its exploration of labour market reconfigurations after the collapse of a major firm (Ansett Airlines) raises questions about geography's faith in the inherently `local' constitution of labour markets. Through an examination of the job reallocation process after…
Family or Enterprise? What shapes the business structures of Australian farming
Australian farmers navigate their contemporary circumstances through the use of different business and legal arrangements that are shaped by the commercial realities of farming and the aspirations of farm-owning households. In posing the question ‘Family or Enterprise?’, this paper examines the extent to which various household and farm business indicators are associated with different forms of farm ownership, namely sole proprietorships, partner…
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…
Becoming Precarious? Precarious Work and Life Trajectories After Retrenchment
Much of the large literature on precarious work has largely tended to assume that precarity is shaped by job quality: that precarious work leads to precarious lives. This paper adds to the literature by questioning this line of causality and highlighting the broader range of influences shaping the lives of older workers who enter precarious work after retrenchment from secure, long-term careers. Drawing on a study of Australia's automotive manufa…
Consuming the City: Public Fashion Festivals and the Participatory Economies of Urban Spaces in Melbourne, Australia
This paper examines how the conduct of a local festival of fashion retailing—the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival—reinvigorates the commodity fair format of older times. The paper takes a longitudinal view of the festival’s evolution and draws on Lefebvre’s spatiology, complemented by Terranova’s approach to the participatory economy, to explore how it produces monetary value as it produces space. The discussion highlights the contradictory nat…
De-industrialisation, financialisation and Australia's macro-economic trap
The seemingly inexorable decline of manufacturing in Australia is typically explained by firm-level competitiveness, especially labour costs, the challenges posed by a peripheral location, and the (Dutch disease) effects of Australia's mining boom. We argue that such explanations are insufficient, and look instead to the way that processes of financialisation and the policy settings of other countries combine to inflate the value of the Australia…
The Embeddedness of Global Production Networks: The Impact of Crisis in Fiji's Garment Export Sector
In this paper the author explores how changing geopolitical conditions reconfigure network embeddedness and theorises the conditions of network disconnection and transformation. Through a case study of the changes in interfirm relationships within the Fiji-Australia garment-production network after Fiji's 2000 political coup d'état, the author develops a relational and dynamic view of embeddedness, highlighting its multifaceted and multiscalar ch…
Not so "smart"? An Australian experiment in smart specialisation
This article explores the utility of applying the European policy of smart specialisation to tackle spatial divergence in the Australian context. Using a geographical political economy approach and considering a growing literature on innovation in peripheral places, the work explores how smart specialisation is applied in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, a coal-dependent non-metropolitan industrial enclave in the Gippsland region. Analysis of the case …
Places that matter: Australia’s crisis intervention framework and voter response
This article contributes to understandings of geographies of discontent by focusing on the way that political frameworks condition the demand for fringe or protest voting. It discusses how Australia’s federal political framework, preferential voting system and timely crisis intervention policies combine to reduce the demand for fringe voting. The local effects of this system are illustrated via an examination of voting patterns in two disadvantag…
Fast Parallels? Contesting Mobile Policy Technologies
This article extends recent examinations of incomplete or disrupted policy mobility by examining the politically volatile case of policies to manage the regional impacts of decarbonization in Australia. The article's extended case study shows how political interests differently incorporated figments of circulating policy into longstanding debates and how more-than-local political networks defeated an antipolitical, technocratic exercise in 'new r…
Accounting for Skill Shortages? Migration and the Australian Labour Market
Although recent circumstances have rekindled interest in matching skilled migrant intakes to domestic labour needs, the factors contributing to migrant employment outcomes remain poorly understood. Contemporary research tends to focus on the best and worst of skilled migrant outcomes – either integration into elite transnational labour markets or relegation to relatively menial work. By approaching the issue from a perspective attuned to differen…
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…
Refashioning the Rag Trade: Internationalising Australia's Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Industries
Service Industries and Asia‐Pacific Cities: New Development Trajectories . Edited by P. W. Daniels, K. C. Ho, and T. A. Hutton
Fashion as viscous knowledge: Fashion's Role in Shaping Trans-National Garment Production
This article develops a perspective of fashion as a complex, multi-dimensional form of knowledge and as a technology of garment mass production. It identifies the various modalities of fashion knowledge and characterises their different rates and extents of transmission across space and time in terms of their relative complexity. The article explores the spatio-temporal configurations of fashion knowledge as it is mobilised in the economy, interr…
The Embeddedness of Global Production Networks: The Impact of Crisis in Fiji's Garment Export Sector
In this paper the author explores how changing geopolitical conditions reconfigure network embeddedness and theorises the conditions of network disconnection and transformation. Through a case study of the changes in interfirm relationships within the Fiji-Australia garment-production network after Fiji's 2000 political coup d'état, the author develops a relational and dynamic view of embeddedness, highlighting its multifaceted and multiscalar ch…
Power and Scale: The Shifting Geography of Industrial Relations Law in Australia
In an increasingly complex literature exploring the geographies of socially constructed scale, interest has focused on the relationship between scale, power and the contested political terrains through which these relations are played out. In this paper, I argue that these interactions must be understood in specific contexts, where shifts in scale are inextricably linked to shifts in the sources and instruments of power. By applying a scale persp…
Strategy and the Contested Politics of Scale: Air Transportation in Australia
This article explores the ways in which the contested reconfiguration of air transportation infrastructures following deregulation in Australia resulted in the rescaling of air transportation services and their disassociation from the scales of political jurisdictions. In tracing the complex interactions between the state's and firms' strategies and their impacts at different scales, the article contends that it is not sufficient to view scale as…
Discrimination, labour markets and the labour market prospects of older workers: What Can a Legal Case Teach Us
As governments become increasingly concerned about the fiscal implications of the ageing population, labour market policies have sought to encourage mature workers to remain in the labour force. The 'human capital' discourses motivating these policies rest on the assumption that older workers armed with motivation and vocational skills will be able to return to fulfilling work. This article uses the post-redundancy recruitment experiences of form…
Beyond “Global Production Networks”: Australian Fashion Week's Trans‐Sectoral Synergies
When studies of industrial organisation are informed by commodity chain, actor network, or global production network theories and focus on tracing commodity flows, social networks, or a combination of the two, they can easily overlook the less routine trans‐sectoral associations that are crucial to the creation and realisation of value. This paper shifts attention to identifying the sites at which diverse specialisations meet to concentrate and a…
Are Labour Markets Necessarily 'Local'? Spatiality, Segmentation and Scale
This paper draws on recent debates about scale to approach the geography of labour markets from a dynamic perspective sensitive to the spatiality and scale of labour market restructuring. Its exploration of labour market reconfigurations after the collapse of a major firm (Ansett Airlines) raises questions about geography's faith in the inherently `local' constitution of labour markets. Through an examination of the job reallocation process after…
Failure and strategic projects: Australia’s Asia–Pacific vision
Shifting spatialities of power: The case of Australasian aviation
Critical Events and Labour Mobility: Relocations in the Wake of the Ansett Airlines Collapse
Migration plays an important role in neo-liberal regional adjustment. This paper explores the role of economic shocks in stimulating internal migration within Australia. Drawing on the experiences of retrenched Ansett Airlines employees, it argues that economic crisis impels some households to relocate but traps others in places with restricted employment prospects. For some, the crisis of retrenchment triggers inter-state migration to take up ne…
The Regional Dimensions of the ‘Transition to a Low-carbon Economy’: The Case of Australia's Latrobe Valley
Weller S. The regional dimensions of the ‘transition to a low-carbon economy’: the case of Australia's Latrobe Valley, Regional Studies. Translating concern about climate change into practical, effective and politically feasible policy action is a key challenge for contemporary governments. In Australia, the government's failure to launch ‘the transition to a low-carbon economy’ is reshaping the political landscape. This article argues that progr…
Commentary: Alice Bryer’s politics of value creation
Financial stress and the long-term outcomes of job loss
This article examines the longer-term effects of job loss for middle income households in Australia. Specifically, it analyses the experiences of workers who lost their jobs in the 2001 collapse of an Australian airline, Ansett Airlines. Since Ansett employees' savings were tied up in the Ansett corporate structure, its workers faced the double jeopardy of losing both their careers and their savings. The article illuminates the role of financial …
To What Extent has Australia's Development Trajectory Been Neoliberalist
Our account of Australia's economic trajectory over the last four decades highlights the play of tensions, contradictions and imperfect resolutions. We see Australia's political economy as shaped by tensions between the opposed needs and demands of inward- and outward-looking sectors, regions and interests, and irresolvably-different understandings of Australia's past and visions of Australia's future. We show how Australia's spatially fragmented…
Creativity or costs? Questioning New Zealand's fashion success: A methodological intervention
This paper questions the proposition that creativity-led cultural industries can prosper in peripheral locations. To that end, it examines the apparent success of New Zealand's designer fashion industry in the first years of the twenty-first century. The paper critiques the conclusion that New Zealand's fashion success was the outcome of national industry policies that nurtured and promoted place-based creative talent. It also critiques the micro…
Consuming the City: Public Fashion Festivals and the Participatory Economies of Urban Spaces in Melbourne, Australia
This paper examines how the conduct of a local festival of fashion retailing—the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival—reinvigorates the commodity fair format of older times. The paper takes a longitudinal view of the festival’s evolution and draws on Lefebvre’s spatiology, complemented by Terranova’s approach to the participatory economy, to explore how it produces monetary value as it produces space. The discussion highlights the contradictory nat…
Family or Enterprise? What shapes the business structures of Australian farming
Australian farmers navigate their contemporary circumstances through the use of different business and legal arrangements that are shaped by the commercial realities of farming and the aspirations of farm-owning households. In posing the question ‘Family or Enterprise?’, this paper examines the extent to which various household and farm business indicators are associated with different forms of farm ownership, namely sole proprietorships, partner…
Actually existing political economies
In this response, we are prompted by the commentaries to discuss three issues: the need to be wary of malleability in the definitions of keywords like neoliberalism; the importance in economic geography of close study of the national scale and the relationships among state policies, economies, societies and national developmental trajectories; and the concern we have about the assumed political utility of the idea of neoliberalism now that its us…
An argument with neoliberalism: Australia’s place in a global imaginary
This article argues that the uncritical application of the lens of neoliberalism closes off opportunities for more rigorous analysis of actually existing socio-economic change. We ask whether Australia’s developmental trajectory over the last three decades can be described as neoliberalization and whether the outcome is a variety of neoliberalism. Instead of stitching together a story about variegated neoliberalism, we find an alternative narrati…
De-industrialisation, financialisation and Australia's macro-economic trap
The seemingly inexorable decline of manufacturing in Australia is typically explained by firm-level competitiveness, especially labour costs, the challenges posed by a peripheral location, and the (Dutch disease) effects of Australia's mining boom. We argue that such explanations are insufficient, and look instead to the way that processes of financialisation and the policy settings of other countries combine to inflate the value of the Australia…
Accounting for Skill Shortages? Migration and the Australian Labour Market
Although recent circumstances have rekindled interest in matching skilled migrant intakes to domestic labour needs, the factors contributing to migrant employment outcomes remain poorly understood. Contemporary research tends to focus on the best and worst of skilled migrant outcomes – either integration into elite transnational labour markets or relegation to relatively menial work. By approaching the issue from a perspective attuned to differen…
Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding
Series Editor Preface viii Acknowledgements ix Permissions x List of Tables xi List of Figures xii 1 Introduction 1 2 The Geographies of Brands and Branding 23 3 Origination 59 4 Local Origination Newcastle Brown Ale 88 5 National Origination Burberry 112 6 Global Origination Apple 139 7 Territorial Development 171 8 Conclusions 194 References 207 Index 224
Economics (33 works) · Political science (31 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Geography (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Business (13 works) · Economic geography (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Political economy (13 works)