RESEARCH INTERESTS
Although I have always been comfortable with being labelled an economic geographer, the type of research I have done in the past two decades has moved away from narrow studies based on location theory and regional economics to more eclectic understandings of the economy that draw on the role of the state, of forms of governance, of culture and society, of technology, and on issues of identity and performativity. My research in a range of different settings has made it clear that geographies of industry vary enormously from place to place not just because of different cost structures, but because industry is locally constructed.
CURRENT PROJECTS
- New geographies of industry in the post-neoliberal age.
- Mobility for persons with disability, especially the design, technology, production networks, and distribution of adaptive cycles.
- The social and geographical construction of technology.
Geographies of industry have been the main focus of my research for over 50 years. Growing up in the industrial port of Liverpool - which at that time was very probably the fastest shrinking city in the world - meant that issues of plant closures, layoffs, unemployment, outmigration, de-industrialization, technical change and the rise of the post-industrial city were everyday experiences, and the opposite of the spatial fix of new industrial capital that I have seen in my research in China. Liverpool's biggest industry is now football, and related tourist activities.
My main research interest is in the post-neoliberal economy as the neoliberal wave of economic restructuring is now buffeted by a wave of counter-globalization. The contemporary economy is intrinsically global in its relations, but local in the way these relations are being played out. It has had profound consequences for the 37 rich OECD countries experiencing massive de-industrialization matched by a rise of their service economies, and it has had equally profound impacts on the newly industrializing countries. It has been accompanied by the re-articulation of global production networks (GPNs), by big changes in forms of work (including home-based work), in gender relations, in the production of people with specific skills and identities - both individual and collective, and by a brisk growth of TNCs, large and small. Some of my recent publications deal with manifestations of these changes in the hockey industry, which has developed international player production networks.
Industrial restructuring has been a recurring element of production since the Industrial Revolution, but it has taken on new forms in the late neoliberal era as social and regional support systems of the post-war Keynesian state have been replaced by new programs that promote de-regulation, financialization, and globalization. This evolving wave of restructuring connects with my research in a number of contexts including : the move to lean production in the Canadian pulp and paper industry; the re-invention of many peripheral resource regions as playgrounds for prodigal cities; the expansion of global production networks that connect, for instance, China with Canada, often resulting in hypermobile trading links of goods and athletes; and the growing significance of performative aspects of the economy at trade shows, protests, and other cultural manifestations which have the capacity to become liminal spaces in this age of branding and technological modernity.
