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The theme issue ‘Making Space for the New State Capitalism’ brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the second of these introductory commentaries, we explore the consequences of embracing relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development, together with the second group of papers. Introducing a final group of papers, the third installment will address the challenges and opportunities of thinking conjuncturally.

Global capitalism is currently experiencing a turbulent and polymorphous (geo)political reordering, encompassing multiple transformations in the landscapes of state intervention, and a drastic reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the world economy. Can the concept of state capitalism aid us in grasping these transformations conceptually? My answer is yes, with the proviso that state capitalism is neither conceptualised as a national (or regional) variety of capitalism, nor as a new regime of accumulation, but as a flexible means of problematising this historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention. Based on this approach, I offer in this essay ten theses on the new state capitalism, its roots in the dynamics of capital accumulation, its relations to broader material conflicts and its potential futures.

The relationship between population growth and economic development has remained a controversial topic since the time of Malthus. Opinion among the scholars on this issue is sharply divided. This article examines the theoretical arguments about the likely consequences—positive or negative—of higher population growth on economic development and looks at the empirical findings on the issue based on the survey of literature in the field. The article traces the historical profile of demographic change in the developed and the developing countries over the last two centuries and analyses the factors behind them with particular reference to China and India. The implications of the findings for population control policy are also examined. There is a growing realisation of the fact that fertility decline is dependent upon socio-economic development. There is a general consensus among demographers that policies for fertility reduction should stress voluntary decisions on the part of the individuals concerned rather than compulsion and should be conceived in the context of a much wider programme for social, economic, and political development. The positive and negative incentives in this situation have a limited role to play in this context.

The present study examines holistic neighborhood change in Los Angeles County across three decades between 1980 and 2010. Using Census tract data, we conduct a latent class analysis to identify classes of neighborhood change for each decade according to housing dynamics, age structure, racial-ethnic composition and churning, and socioeconomic characteristics, and describe latent classes indicative of gentrification. Further, we assess the degree to which tracts experience sustained or repeated gentrification over the 30 year period. In line with more recent conceptualizations of gentrification as a broad urban process, we find that gentrification occurs in a wide range of neighborhoods, and manifests itself differently according to shifts in population characteristics, with many tracts experiencing more than one successive period of gentrification over the 30 year period.

Theories of ‘growth models’ explain capitalist diversity by reference to shifting drivers of aggregate demand in different national economies. This article expands the growth models framework beyond its conventional focus on debt-driven and export-driven demand, through an ideational analysis of Thatcher’s vision of a property-owning democracy, and Blair’s knowledge-driven growth agenda. Drawing on policymakers’ statements, it shows how these hypothetical growth models differed from the debt-driven growth model that ultimately prevailed. Using data on the distribution of wealth and wages, it highlights how both approaches failed to generate sustainable demand; in Thatcher’s case, because of an insufficiently broad distribution of capital ownership, in Blair’s case, because of an insufficiently broad distribution of lucrative knowledge work. This indicates that explanations of dysfunctional growth models need to consider not just the split of national income between labour and capital, but also the distribution of both labour income and capital income between households.

Cruise tourism is the fastest-growing branch of the tourism sector, and many have turned to it as a development strategy despite little systematic evidence of its equilibrium effects. I match 10.6 million automatic identification system (AIS) locations from 517 cruise ships arriving in 265 port destinations to 355,463 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) women’s surveys in 23 countries to estimate cruise tourism’s relationship with women’s labor market participation and educational attainment. Using fixed effects to identify changes in tourism over time, I estimate that doubling cruise ship arrivals is associated with a 4.9-percentage point increase in labor participation and one-quarter more years of education. These results would be consistent with port cities offering more job opportunities for older women and increased opportunity and available income for education, possibly in anticipation of improved employment prospects. JEL Classifications: D50, I00, J21, O12, Z32

This article contributes to the study of globalization and social change in rural Kerala by examining the historical trajectories of educational, occupational and spatial mobility among three communities—Syrian Christians, Ezhavas and Pulayas—in the village of Kavakad, Kerala. It addresses the involvement of each community in transnational migration and related mobilities away from the village. The article is based on quantitative data collected through an intergenerational family survey and semi-structured interviews conducted in Kavakad. The research reveals that while the dominant Syrian Christian community gained most from transnational migration, all three communities benefited from forms of upward mobility. However, our findings also confirm that, despite various forms of mobility, longstanding social inequalities between Syrian Christians, Ezhavas and Pulayas in the village persist. The article highlights the ways in which spatial mobility is a key factor in shaping the relative social mobility of each community. As such, it contributes to our understanding of the reproduction of inequality in contemporary Kerala and, in particular, of the ways in which historically accumulated resources and community networks enabled Syrian Christians to turn transnational migration into lasting forms of upward mobility. It also suggests a need for alternative development interventions at the local level to support the spatial mobility of marginalized rural communities.

This article intends to contribute to the debate on the quantification of gentrification, which is constrained by two main obstacles: firstly, the operationalisation of displacement of socially weak households, which appears as an elusive phenomenon. Secondly, the consideration of the specific urban context, in particular the regulation of the housing market. Based on a case study for Vienna, this paper introduces a new empirical approach, which does not focus on households, but on the tenement conversion of the historic housing stock. Here, the transformation as legal conversion and demolition of historic tenement houses (German: Zinshäuser) serve as an alternative indicator for the operationalisation and quantification of displacement processes. The empirical analysis of Zinshaus transformations observed for 2007-2019 for the first time provides an estimation of gentrification dynamics in Vienna. Results point to a pronounced cyclicality in transformation dynamics. Hence, spatial cluster and hotspot analyses reveal a strong concentration of Zinshaus transformations and a clear shift from central bourgeois to peripheral working-class neighbourhoods. Further, a multilinear regression model confirms the impact of Zinshaus transformations on the social dynamics in these neighbourhoods. However, data do not indicate a social shift triggered by upper-class households, but by new migrant groups and well-educated middle-class households. Beyond the case of Vienna, this analysis underlines the relevance of quantitative gentrification approaches based on housing-market segments and their conversion. It proposes applying the Zinshaus as an indicator to make the variety of the urban context visible.

The amount of empirical research on the extent, causes, and consequences of gentrification continues to expand. This article reviews the methods utilized to delimit and quantify gentrification in the literature. Such measurement is undertaken in order to assess the consequences of gentrification, such as displacement, over various time scales and geographies. Recent research has demonstrated that the use of different quantitative definitions of gentrification may yield conflicting research results, and further, can muddy the waters for policymaking and political discourse. This article critically assesses the breadth of quantitative definitions and offers recommendations for future studies.

In contrast to the pervasive confidence that the development of nuclear weapons ensures peace and stability by making wars too expensive to fight for, South Asian strategic stability has drifted into nasty security competition through arms race with an episodical crisis that continues at the sub-conventional level. Deterrence studies that were relegated to the bins of history soon after the end of the Cold War received a renewed interest of scholars on the subject since the demonstration of deterrent capabilities by South Asian rivals in 1998. A new wave of deterrence studies has developed in the current multipolar world with some scholars adopting Cold War models of analysis in the contemporary realms of South Asia, whereas other are attempting new analytical approaches. This article aims to offer a fresh look at how to provide a clear concept of strategic stability, how strategic stability is applicable in contemporary South Asia and what the recent crisis between India and Pakistan being interwoven with terrorism tells us about crisis stability between the two countries under the shadows of nuclear weapons.

Communities share challenges with the neighborhoods to which former residents move and the neighborhoods from which new residents arrive. A lack of migration data for small geographic areas, however, makes it difficult to identify places that share populations over time. This article uses longitudinal consumer credit data to evaluate the spatial connectivity of neighborhoods. The paper develops a methodology for the construction of Small-Area Moving Ratios (SMvRs), motivating the approach with two applications: (1) the visualization of residential mobility ties across Massachusetts neighborhoods and (2) the application of a community detection algorithm to identify communities of strongly interconnected places. The research produces novel evidence showing that the connectivity between neighborhoods differs for socioeconomically advantaged versus for disadvantaged movers. This work shows how longitudinal, geolocated business administrative datasets can be repurposed to produce planning-relevant insights.

Ridesourcing advocates and companies promise many benefits to cities, such as increased accessibility, a solution to the last-mile transit problem, and even reduced need for automobiles. However, an important body of research has indicated that ridesourcing is more heavily used by more privileged consumers and in more affluent and whiter neighborhoods. Questions have also emerged about the effects of ridesourcing on public transportation. This study builds on a mobility disparities perspective by analyzing ridesourcing in the context of urban inequality, including gentrification and displacement. Using a large data set from the Chicago area, this study shows that ridesourcing is associated with areas that have seen rising rents and have become whiter and more educated. The results also show that ridesourcing is more prevalent in areas that are accessible by public transportation. Although the causal relationship between ridesourcing and gentrification is complex, the study suggests a new direction in the literature that embeds the analysis of ridesourcing in the broader frameworks of unequal urban development and neoliberalization. The study also suggests policy approaches that could help to reduce some of the connections between ridesourcing and urban inequity.

We examine the match/mismatch between the demand and supply of impact investments. We show that some geographic regions display an upward match, while others exhibit a downward match. We explain how regions with well-developed (or less-developed) economies are not necessarily equal to regions with well-developed (or less-developed) impact investment markets. We also highlight the sectors exhibiting a match or mismatch between the demand and supply of investments, and explain the potential reasons. Regarding both geographic and sector concentration, the demand for investments is much more concentrated than their supply. Finally, early-stage companies suffer from an undersupply of investments, while growth-stage companies display an upward match and mature companies have an oversupply of investments. These findings have implications for impact investing theory and practice, including the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals. JEL Classification: D53; E41; E51; G15; G23

This paper investigates the long-term and causal relationship between tourism activity and the informal economy in 76 countries from 1995 to 2015. We explore this relationship at the global level and by country group, using panel, co-integration techniques that indicate the existence of a long-run co-integration relationship between tourism and informal economy for the whole sample and at the level of country groups. Additionally, the paper analyzes the long-run coefficients of the model by using fully modified ordinary least square regressions (FMOLS). The results from FMOLS evidence a negative and significant impact of tourism on the informal economy at the global level and in high, upper-middle, and lower-middle income countries, but a positive link in low-income countries. However, the results reveal a heterogeneous long-run relationship within country groups. Also, the result of the Dumitrescu-Hurlin Granger causality test indicates bidirectional causality in the global sample, but the direction of causality varies by country group. The main policy implication derived from our findings suggests that in order to reduce the size of informal economy, policy-makers should foster tourism activities. JEL Classification : J01, L83, C23, O57, C00, C01

This report draws upon political ecology and nature–society geography to examine the production network–nature nexus. Indebted to these approaches, a growing number of production network and value chain studies are expanding well beyond the field’s traditional remit of environmental governance. This work centers the institutional arrangements of firms, laboratories, workers, and regulations that organize and combine extensive and intensive strategies to appropriate nature’s value. ‘Nature’ is neither input nor output here; rather, it is metabolized in and through the functional coordination of these spatially distributed activities. I explore these themes in recent studies of resource extraction and frontier-making, chemical geographies of biocides, and the material-cum-geographical claims of ethical supply chains. Expanding and deepening the dialogue between conjunctural analyses of states, labor, and supply chains, on the one hand, and how socionatures condition these arrangements, on the other, is both analytically and politically necessary. I offer this, my final report, as a modest contribution to this endeavor.

The migration of women or female migration has emerged as an important field of research within the larger domain of migration studies and is being extensively explored under various disciplines. This growing trend can be attributed to some major developments in international migration such as rising numbers of women migrants, growth of women-centric occupations, migration of women in an independent capacity, women-related legislations and growth of gendered perspectives on various issues. These factors together increased the visibility of women in the migration process and have given rise to what has been termed the ‘feminization of migration’. This paper explores the various nuances of the feminization of migration and aspects of female migration focusing on India. It begins with an overview of the growing numbers of women in the migratory flows and goes on to determine that despite the rising numbers and increased participation of women in the developmental dynamics of migration, they remain increasingly vulnerable and exposed to exploitation. The paper also highlights some of the critical policy decisions of the Government of India. The paper concludes that feminization of migration has undoubtedly increased the visibility of women in the migration discourse but much more needs to be done in terms of generating appropriate data, highlighting women’s role in the developmental process, evolving policies for ensuring their protection and security and above all empowering them and increasing their participation in the labour market.

This article critically investigates the global trend toward urban innovation districts, a distinctly 21st-century spatial form. Innovation districts are a place-based, economic development strategy to concentrate the actors, entities, and infrastructure considered essential to process and product innovation. Built on the idea that today's innovation requires continuous interaction, the design of innovation districts incorporates a density of living and working amenities to accommodate a 24-7 live–work–play environment. At the heart of the innovation district strategies are the entrepreneurs meant to benefit from the built-in supports that help them scale their ideas and introduce products to the market. Despite an embrace by policymakers, to date, there has been little systematic analysis and critique of innovation district strategies or attempts to understand them as tools of neoliberal urban economic development. This article tracks how planners and other city development officials endorsed innovation districts during the Global Financial Crisis. The districts were a stopgap policy measure to accumulate economic benefits while waiting for market activity to resume. Furthermore, this paper argues that the emergence of innovation district strategy points to new governance arrangements that shift the burden of urban revitalization onto entrepreneurs who catalyze growth through their consumption and production activities. The findings are based on content analysis, site observations, and interviews with the creators, implementers, stakeholders, and users of innovation districts in Boston, St. Louis, and Dublin.

Airbnb has a major role to play in the competitiveness of the overall accommodation sector of individual destinations and it is rather unlikely that this role will diminish in the post-COVID-19 recovery of the tourism industry. Therefore, the present study motivates the Airbnb sector to look back at its past performance for insights that can be used in setting post-pandemic targets. In particular, this research assesses competitiveness of the Airbnb listings of 28 European cities by including hotel-related data as uncontrollable input variables within interactive data envelopment analysis modeling. The contribution lies in joining Airbnb listings and hotels into the benchmarking discussion and efficiency analysis, along with looking beyond the cumulative number of listings by dissecting the overall sector into commercial and private listings—something that has not been attempted as of yet, in spite of the ever-growing body of literature on the sharing economy.

In this paper we move away from a static view of neighbourhood inequality and investigate the dynamics of neighbourhood economic status, which ties together spatial income inequality at different moments in time. Using census data from three decades (1980–2010) in 294 metropolitan statistical areas, we use a statistical decomposition method to unpack the aggregate spatiotemporal income dynamic into its contributing components: stability, growth and polarisation, providing a new look at the economic fortunes of diverse neighbourhoods. We examine the relative strength of each component in driving the overall pattern, in addition to whether, how, and why these forces wax and wane across space and over time. Our results show that over the long run, growth is a dominant form of change across all metros, but there is a very clear decline in its prominence over time. Further, we find a growing positive relationship between the components of dispersion and growth, in a reversal of prior trends. Looking across metro areas, we find temporal heterogeneity has been driven by different socioeconomic factors over time (such as sectoral growth in certain decades), and that these relationships vary enormously with geography and time. Together these findings suggest a high level of temporal heterogeneity in neighbourhood income dynamics, a phenomenon which remains largely unexplored in the current literature. There is no universal law governing the changing economic status of neighbourhoods in the US over the last 40 years, and our work demonstrates the importance of considering shifting dynamics over multiple spatial and temporal scales.

This paper explores Stuart Cunningham’s thought leadership in ‘creative’ spaces since the turn of the millennium. It presents the author's personal glimpses of Cunningham's contributions to scholarship and advocacy, ranging from Cunningham and Hartley's exposé on the recently-titled creative industries at the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit (Canberra, 2001), through the establishment of QUT's Centre of Excellence (Brisbane, 2005) and its European node (London, 2008), to Cunningham's more recent work with creative economies and their opportunities, including his influence upon Australia's Cultural and Creative Economy: A 21st-Century Guide (Canberra, 2020). The paper concludes with some comments about continuing resistance to substantial investment in Australia's creative industries, and Cunningham's call for a more united voice in their advocacy.

Combining insights from evolutionary economic geography and socio-technical transition studies, this article provides a conceptual framework and a theory-informed empirical analysis of policy dimensions for regional green restructuring. The combination of these two perspectives allows the application and confrontation of analytical concepts with the particularities of regions, with a specific focus on the role of policy to ensure directionality. Empirically our discussion is illustrated by a case study of Western Norway, a specialized industrial region. We focus on the role of policy for the development of new green technology pathways within this region. We observe that different industry transition pathways within a region are influenced by various combinations of policy action, and that policy for regional green restructuring includes complex policy mixes initiated at different levels of governance. Our framework provides a suitable scheme for assessing the role of policy for green restructuring in regions.

This article reports on a cross-country city-based investigation that profiles the middle class in Africa and distinguishes discrete segments that demonstrate the importance of heterogeneity when studying the middle class. The authors identify three distinct middle-class segments by administering both qualitative and quantitative questionnaires across ten cities. They explore consumer behavior–related factors, such as lifestyle and purchasing, to answer calls to provide more marketing insight into the African middle class. The discussion also outlines theoretical and managerial implications.

Social mobility research mainly investigates directional change in socio-economic circumstance. This article contributes to the strand of social mobility research that examines subjective experiences of economic movement. It analyses social mobility as a set of relationally, temporally and spatially embedded social practices, subjectively experienced and interpreted. The interactive nexus between social and spatial mobility is a fruitful line of inquiry, and the experiences of international migrants are distinctly suited for developing this analysis. Drawing on a qualitative study of migrants’ mobilities, both social and spatial, post-arrival in Australia, we argue that social mobility is experienced as sets of contingent social practices. These in/variably co-exist with aspirations for a sense of belonging and connectedness, a sense of security and other non-economic needs and desires and are also always adjusted over time. In addition, migrants’ status as legal, cultural or social Others shapes the experience of social mobility in distinctive ways.

This study was conducted to analyse the influence of technological differences on hotel efficiency in the Canary Islands (Spain), with particular regard to the heterogeneity observed in hotel ownership and size. A metafrontier approach, based on non-parametric deterministic efficiency methods (data envelopment analysis and free-disposal hull) and robust non-parametric estimators (order-α), is used. This empirical analysis considered a panel data sample selection model of Canary Islands hotels for the period 2002–2015. The results obtained show that the frontiers against which the hotels are compared (metafrontier or group) and the consideration or otherwise of outliers are factors of crucial importance. We find that efficiency depends on hotel size (large hotels are more efficient than small ones), but not on the type of ownership. The results also show that the impact of the global financial crisis on the average technical efficiency of these hotels was slight or non-existent. Finally, the technological gap narrowed over time, especially in large hotels and those with no majority shareholder.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) refers to entrepreneurial activities of established and existing firms. It is different from individual entrepreneurial orientation (Popov et al., 2019, Education + Training, vol. 61, pp. 65–78). EO refers to the processes, practices, and decision-making activities that lead to new venture creation (Walter et al., 2006, Journal of Business Venturing, vol. 21, pp. 541–567). The EO scale by Lumpkin and Dess (1996, Academy of Management Review, vol. 21, pp. 135–172) consists of innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy. This scale is widely used in literature with major drawback of it being developed and evaluated in a developed economy (the USA) on large corporations. Very little literature is available with reference to validation of EO scales in developing economies, particularly India where firms are generally small. New Comprehensive Entrepreneurial Orientation Scale (CENTORES) has been developed and validated by adding additional dimension of strategic flexibility, which is the novelty of the present study. Data were collected using a survey instrument comprising of 19 items. The scientific scale development procedure as suggested by Schwab, (1980) was followed, first an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was done to explore factors and later confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was done to confirm factors (using SPSS and Amos). Six stable factors emerged from EFA which were subsequently confirmed through CFA. The measurement model confirmed the factors with good model fit indices as suggested by Hair et al. (2014). The model has CMIN/df = 2.237, CFI = 0.917, GFI = 0.928, NFI = 0.882, and RMSEA = 0.052.

Recent developments in regional studies argue that geopolitical influence is one factor affecting the regional order. However, studies on geopolitical influence have yet to cover East Asia to explain East Asia's regional order. The quantitative approach to geopolitical influence studies still faces a methodological challenge because it uses an arbitrary weighting of geopolitical influence in developing an index. In order to address those challenges, this research deploys factor analysis as a non-arbitrary weighting system to measure the geopolitical influence of China, Japan, Russia, and the US in East Asia during the period from 2005 to 2018. Additionally, this research explores how the geopolitical influence of those countries affects East Asia's regional cooperation and integration. The research shows that: (1) China has been able to compete with the US for geopolitical influence in East Asia since 2014, and (2) Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and US geopolitical influence positively contributes to regional cooperation and integration in East Asia, with the US and China as the main contributors. The research highlights three possible causes to explain the results: China's regional infrastructure initiatives, rejuvenation of China's view on globalization, and the relative decline of US relations with the allies in the region.

Despite the contentious success of the trade agreements, the island countries have still been vehemently negotiating further trade deals. This study explores the element which enhances trade flows for selected Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean and Pacific regions. The results suggest that income (gross domestic product) growth as significant support for trade flows, regional trade integrations of the Pacific and Caribbean are explained in its quiet dynamism, worth strengthening and further reforming. This study, by means of a comparative investigation of selected countries from within the Pacific and the Caribbean regions, proposes that the strategy for enhancing trade integration is creating demand for diversification in the region through greater regional integration. The estimates demonstrate that the level of diversification positively impacted the regions’ bilateral export, having the Pacific region influenced almost twice as much like the Caribbean. Moreover, whilst understanding that the geographical location of the Caribbean already lets its states thrive through lower trading costs as compared to the Pacific, analysis in the study shows that the distance, remoteness and logistics difficulties inflate the price (or trade costs) limiting the success of regional trade agreements. JEL Classification: F13, F15

Economic geography studies revealed that regional economies are heavily dependent on path-dependent network-based complexities. Innovation and technology are the key concepts for regional economic growth and the uneven geography of innovation is quite decisive for the regional stability of the countries. In this regard, the network topology of the regional relatedness of patent production is embedded on unequal population cartograms in order to better display the uneven geography of innovation in Turkey. The study reveals that the geography of the patent production has a dynamic pattern that it spreads from patent-producing hubs to their surrounding regions that have never produced. Besides, an increasing variety of classes indicates that new technologies are emerging in some regions. Istanbul covers almost 60% of the patent production of the country. There are around 10 industrialized secondary hub regions existing which the two out of them (Adana and Gaziantep, cities of the east closest to the West and Mediterranean zone) are located in eastern Turkey. Eastern regions have medium size connections with the western hub regions which they are attaching to existing major nodes.

Small tourism firms (STFs) established and operated by local families can be an engine of sustainable rural tourism. This paper stresses the intimate intertwining of family and business in rural STFs and conceptualizes their entrepreneurial success as a combination of business performance and family well-being. Integrating the resource-based view and network embeddedness theory, relationships among the STF owners’ dual social networks (family and industry networks), entrepreneurial resource acquisition, and entrepreneurial success are proposed and tested with a sample of 276 STFs in rural China. The empirical analyses reveal that (1) compared with tangible and knowledge-based resources, the owners’ acquisition of psychic resources has the strongest effect on entrepreneurial success; and (2) although industry networks provide more diverse access to entrepreneurial resources, family networks are superior in facilitating psychic resource acquisition, thus are especially important to the entrepreneurial success of rural STFs. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

There has been a recent interest in expanding the focus of deindustrialisation studies to the cities of the Global South. Bangalore, with its long legacy of state sponsored industrialisation, as well as a substantial shift in its economy following economic liberalisation in 1991, presents itself as a suitable case to examine the impacts of industrial transformation. We study the decline of the engineering economy in one of Bangalore’s earliest planned industrial suburbs, Rajajinagar, to understand how industrial restructuring at the city and national scale has affected and reconfigured local economies. Using this case study, we make two main theoretical contributions: one, we bring out shifts at a neighbourhood scale that go beyond the existing literature on neoliberal transformations in Bangalore as well as other Indian cities. Two, the case also allows us to assess the limitations of deindustrialisation as a framework to analyse these changes, and we suggest a modified framework, that of ‘industrial destabilisation’.

Synthesising the endogenous-centred evolutionary economic geography perspective, and the globally oriented ‘global pipelines’ and global production networks frameworks, this article develops the ‘boundary spanner’ concept to propose a theoretical framework to illustrate how resourceful actors, as boundary spanners, globalise clusters and in turn drive cluster evolution. This framework comprises four interrelated cluster boundary-spanning functions, namely, discursive construction, innovation promotion, production coordination and market reach. This article aims to advance the cluster literature by unpacking how clusters’ global connections are constructed and maintained, conceptualising the multidimensional role of the agency of boundary spanners and demonstrating boundary spanners’ contributions to cluster evolution.

In this article, we focus on ways in which ‘internal migration industries’ shape the housing location of refugees in cities. Based on empirical studies in Halle, Schwerin, Berlin, Stuttgart and Dresden, we bring two issues together. First, we show how a specific financialised accumulation model of renting out privatised public housing stock to disadvantaged parts of the population has emerged that increasingly targets migrant tenants. With the growing immigration of refugees to Germany since 2015, this model has intensified. Second, we discuss how access to housing is formed by informal agents. While housing is almost inaccessible for households on social welfare, the situation is even worse for refugees. This situation has given rise to a new ‘shadow economy’ for housing that offers services with dubious quality for excessive fees. Bringing these two issues together, we argue that housing provision to refugees has become a new business opportunity. This has given rise to a broad variety of ‘internal migration industries’ that provide the housing infrastructure, but also control access to housing. This not only results in new opportunities for profit extraction, but actively shapes new patterns of segregation and the concentration of refugees in particular types of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002347 bundesministerium für bildung und forschung https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002347

This article analyzes the consequences of tourism specialization on efficiency in the hotel sector. The evidence found in other sectors and economies supports the goodness specialization. Nevertheless, tourism-led economies have particular issues that need to be addressed such as seasonality and the lack of significant tradable competitive activities that could trigger spillover effects to services. Spain provides a suitable context for a comparative case study where industrial-led provinces coexist with others that are tourism-led. The article assumes a novel panel data stochastic frontier (SF) model where inefficiency is explained by industrial and service specialization, international competitiveness, tourism specialization, quality of tourism supply, and seasonality. All variables contribute to reducing inefficiency, but service specialization makes the biggest impact. Hence, tourism-led provinces produce the highest efficiency scores.

Research on the overlap between race and vulnerability to the physical and governance-related aspects of climate change is often globally scaled, based on extended temporalities, and colour-coded with non-white populations recognized as being at greater risk of experiencing the adverse effects of climate change. This article shows how de-centring whiteness from its position as automatic, oppositional counterpart to blackness can make space for greater recognition of the role played by the environment in processes of racialization. De-centring whiteness in this way would form a valuable step towards recognizing how race, constructed in part through shifting relations between people and the environment, overlaps with climate vulnerability within multiracial populations. Without discounting the value of global, colour-coded interpretations of race, I point out the limits of their applicability to understandings of how climate change is unfolding Guyana and Suriname, two multiracial Caribbean countries. I argue that in the postcolonial period, relations with the environment take historical constructions of race forward in ways that undergird the impacts of climate change. Even further, I show how the environment has always played a key, underacknowledged role in processes of racialization, complicating colour-coded interpretations of race, whether global or local. Publisher PDF

In this study, a coordination model based on the data of urban population and built-up areas from 2006 to 2015 is used to assess the relationship between population urbanization and urban sprawl across 654 cities in Mainland China. For analysis, 654 cities are divided into five categories (small city, medium city, large city, super city and mega city) and the relationship between population urbanization and urban sprawl is divided into four types (rapid growth of population, rapid expansion of land, shrinkage of population and land and coordinated development between population and land). The results show that 60.6% of cities are rapid expansion of land, 18.5% are rapid growth of population, 14.1% are shrinkage of population and land and only 6.9% of cities are coordinated development between population and land. Small, medium, large and super cities were characterized by rapid expansion of land, while mega cities featured rapid growth of population. The size of the cities decreased mainly because of the shrinkage of people and land while it increased because of the rapid expansion of land. The cities with shrinkage of population and land, and rapid growth of population are mostly distributed in the east of the Hu Line.

Cities are widely considered to be the engines of economic growth, as they contribute for more than 70% of global economy. However, the haphazard urbanisation trends are today resulting in widespread problems of urban sprawl, pollution, housing, crime and disaster and so on. While India is one of the least urbanised large developing countries of the world, the country is witnessing rapid urbanisation (projected to add 404 million of urban population by 2050). However, the associated problems are impacting the liveability of the cities in India. In light of that, this study aims to evaluate the liveability of Tier-1 cities of India. In reference to the existing literature, eleven key indicators have been identified for the evaluation of liveability. For the ease of analysis, these indicators are broadly clustered under five categories, that is, health, environment, transport, geography and socio-economy. The correlation analysis between the indicators and the number of Covid-19 cases in selected cities of India reveal a significant relationship between the individual categories such as ‘quality of life’ and ‘health index’.

Urbanisation in India is reshaping established social and economic patterns of behaviour in ways that scholars are struggling to analyse. This article introduces this special issue presenting new empirical research on the interconnections between gender, social change and urbanisation in India. It does so by relying on a unique dataset drawn from nearly 15,000 households across four consequential urban clusters—Dhanbad, Indore, Patna and Varanasi—in North India. The collection of articles in this issue informs new inquiries into women’s employment, women’s agency and the construction and shaping of social attitudes. Specifically, the articles disentangle the practical barriers to women’s economic empowerment, measure how employment and household dynamics shape women’s agency and explore ways in which status hierarchies and variation in access to information colour women’s social attitudes and political preferences. Collectively, they demonstrate the uneven nature of gender empowerment in the shadow of an urbanising, but highly stratified economy and society.

As religion gains prominence in several countries, research to understand the dynamics between religion and business becomes critical. Extant research paid scant attention to the influence of religion on entrepreneurial activities. To develop insights into this phenomenon, we conduct reflexive field-based case study research on a family business in Kazakhstan that experienced the inclusion of religion as a dominant logic in the management. Kazakhstan provides an interesting context to study the phenomenon as religion gained prominence in post-Soviet Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Our study reveals how religion can influence the entrepreneurial mind and activities and transform the family business. Our inductive theorization offers a process model of entrepreneurial journey under the influence of religion and its impact on the organizing of family business. The model consists of influenced disruption, creative combination and pragmatic adaptation through which the entrepreneur with religion as a dominant logic can transform the family business and attain organizational stability. For academia, the study contributes to extend the scholarly understanding of religion as an influencer in entrepreneurship and family business. For practice, our work shows how religious principles as constraints can enact creativity and innovation in organizational transformation.

Gentrification and labour precarisation constitute prominent responses to urban capitalist crises. They have typically been addressed in the literature as distinct processes. Even though they can indeed occur independently of one another, here we argue that they are also often deeply interconnected. To do so, we utilise a mix of fieldwork and secondary data to investigate how gentrification has both fostered labour precarisation but also how it has been supported by it, within a context of economic recession yet growing tourist inflows into two neighbourhoods (Koukaki and Kerameikos) in central Athens, Greece. Our findings show that the growth of precarious labour in construction has facilitated the development of several gentrification loci whilst, in turn, gentrification’s consolidation has encouraged the growth of poor working conditions in local lodging, hospitality/catering, and creative activities. Ultimately, in highlighting the role of labour precarisation in gentrification, the paper argues that these processes are more than mere parts of an opportunistic conjuncture. Instead, their interconnectedness constitutes an integral part of the city’s contemporary urbanisation, being a continuation of the crisis-struck, construction-driven economic models that have historically characterised much of the Mediterranean European Union.

We are living through a global urban transition, but the timing of this transition has varied significantly across countries and regions. This geographic variation in timing matters, both theoretically and substantively. Yet contemporary debates on urbanism hinge primarily on questions of universalism versus particularism, at the expense of attention to how history and geography collide to shape urban processes. Specifically, they neglect the critical fact that urbanisation in many countries today is late within the context of the global urban transition. We argue that trajectories of contemporary urbanisation must be understood in relation to a suite of conditions unique to the late 20th and early 21st centuries and partly shaped by early urbanisation, including historically unprecedented demographic intensity, hyperglobalisation, centripetal state politics and the spectre of environmental catastrophe in the late Anthropocene. These factors condition the range of possibilities for late urbanisers in ways that did not apply to early urbanisers yet can also produce diverse outcomes depending on local circumstances. We draw on a comparison between countries in sub-Saharan Africa and China to illustrate why the conditions of late urbanisation matter, but also why they have produced highly variable outcomes and are not deterministic of urban futures.

This is an accepted manuscript version of an article published by Sage on August 19, 2021, available from https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764211038412. Reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Recent studies on regional industrial path development call for new perspectives and studies of how a region’s endogenous and exogenous processes (e.g. networks, capital, knowledge) influence its industries, and more recently, the greening of those industries. To this end, recent research has focused on increasing our understanding of the roles of firm and non-firm agency and multi-scalar dynamics (e.g. value chains, national and global regulations). However, the literature has naturally tended to focus more on territorial dynamics (e.g. agglomerations, clusters, regional innovation systems) than on the role of sectoral characteristics to explain regional industrial path development and regional industry greening. To address this, we have developed a framework built on the sectoral innovation systems literature to provide a better explanation of the role of sectoral characteristics in regional industrial path development. We argue herein that the greening of regional industrial paths can be strongly influenced by sectoral characteristics (e.g. standards, markets, technological solutions, laws, regulations), and not merely by territorial characteristics. Our theory-based argument is practically exemplified by an investigation of how a new green technology, onshore power supply, has influenced the greening of two industries (i.e. maritime and petroleum) in the rural Arctic region of northern Norway.

In recent years, geographers have evinced how infrastructure constitutes the bedrock of supply chain capitalism and its oppressions. This article interrogates how advanced automation – comprising robotics, artificial intelligence and software – is poised to politicize this infrastructural space further on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflecting on COVID-19 developments, the article shows how logistics is turning to advanced automation to drive productivity outside labour, spur self-service consumption through digital technologies and contest labour’s future. As automated infrastructure threatens to take hold, a configuration of exchange that increasingly places labour, but not profits, outside of capital’s circulations will need to be challenged

Knowledge has replaced labor as the key factor for productivity growth in innovation discourse. The Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship (KSTE) provides the theoretical foundation to bridge the gap between knowledge and productivity growth. The way regional knowledge actually contributes to productivity growth requires a theoretical explanation because knowledge capability is an indirect and intangible input for regional productivity growth. Previous research has shown that entrepreneurship alone is insufficient to drive productivity improvements. We examine how knowledge capabilities lead to meaningful growth outcomes of new firms in a region. This study examines the determinants of productivity growth by analyzing the factors of entrepreneurship and knowledge capabilities at the regional level, especially considering the moderating effect of entrepreneurship between knowledge and regional growth; by comparing different dimensions of local knowledge capabilities; and by aggregating the contribution of knowledge capabilities and entrepreneurship to productivity growth at the regional level. The empirical analysis is performed on Italian NUTS-3 regions by utilizing an integrated data set combining patent data from the EPO PATSTAT database, and regional data from Eurostat regional statistics. This study makes two main contributions to the KSTE literature by linking knowledge, entrepreneurship, and regional growth and by providing empirical results on different aspects of regional knowledge capability. Our findings identify which types of local knowledge capabilities are more important and how related innovative activity interacts with entrepreneurial activity, elucidating the mechanisms by which knowledge affects labor productivity through entrepreneurship.

This article studies the returns to education in the Argentinian tourism sector considering tourism specialisation. With data from the Permanent Household and Hotel Occupancy Surveys, we make use of Mincer equations to understand the relation between wages and education. For that, we take into account three different types of agglomerates: Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), agglomerates more specialised in tourism (AT) and agglomerates less specialised in tourism (ALT). We find that, for tourism workers, there is a penalty in returns to education, which differs according to the type of agglomerate. These negative returns are partially mitigated by tourism specialisation. In CABA, the most developed and specialised destination, there is almost no penalty. In the case of AT, the mitigation is greater than in ALT. Consequently, this specialisation positions AT in the tourism development path leading to the improvement of labour conditions. There should therefore be an interaction between tourism and education, and it is also imperative to generate incentives and partnerships for the improvement of the sector’s training and labour conditions.

We use the entry of 17 external shopping malls in Sweden to investigate how they have affected the performance of incumbent firms located in the city centres of small cities. Estimating a traditional fixed effects regression model while controlling for firm-specific heterogeneity, we find that entry by external shopping malls decreased the labour productivity of incumbent firms in city centres by 5.31%. Revenues decrease by 6.62%, while the reduction in the number of employees (0.45%) is small and not significantly different from zero. However, using time-specific fixed effects to control for common time trends in retailing in small cities, we find that the impact on labour productivity, revenues and the number of employees due to the entry of external shopping malls becomes insignificant. Thus, incumbent firms in small cities have a negative development path mainly due to long-term economic trends, possibly because of the combination of urbanization effects and a lack of local investments.

This article focuses on licensing – the practise of brand ‘extension’ – to investigate global media distribution as it contingently emerges from the infrastructural spaces of professional trade events. Licensing expos are not only aesthetic, legal and financial compounds that ‘produce’ media distribution by coordinating the exchange of economic assets and the provision of adaptations, ancillary goods and ‘scripted experiences’ for global blockbuster films and media franchises. They are also sites where diffuse forms of power circulate within and against the bodies of their attendees through assemblages of data, objects, architectures and repeatable technical standards. Through multi-sited participant observation at these affective infrastructures, the paper argues that the production of media distribution is inseparable from the production of subjectivities – of the professionals that make these events as well as the active audiences whose behaviours they aim at envisioning, preempting and shaping.

As one of the first studies to explore the joint consumption of both leisure and pandemic-related tourism products in former pandemic epicenters, this research expands the scope of dark tourism to include former pandemic epicenters. The motivational determinants of intention to visit leisure and pandemic-related sites are empirically identified using an ordered logit model. This is the first study which formally proposes patriotism as a new push motive in stimulating people to visit post-disaster destinations. The identified segmentations of tourists with different levels of push–pull motives and socio-demographic features provide key stakeholders and practitioners in former epicenters with a systematic recovery plan in the post-pandemic era.