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This paper examines the impacts of Brexit as an external shock to European financial centre relations. In particular, it studies the changing nature of Paris-London financial relations post Brexit. Early on in the Brexit process, Paris was not understood as the most likely European centre to benefit from Brexit given its tax regime and high office costs. However, our analysis shows that through policy and corporate network change, it has been one of the major beneficiaries. In making this argument, the paper develops a sympathetic critique of work on global cities that has tended to emphasise corporate networks without fully situating them within their political landscapes. We argue that bringing work in economic geography into closer dialogue with work in international political economy offers one fruitful way of addressing this oversight and, in turn, better understanding how inter-city relations respond to external shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom's (UK) withdrawal from the European Union (EU) will reshape the geography of European finance. From January 2021, the UK will no longer be able to sell financial services cross-border into the EU's Single Market as it has done as a Member State. Through what are called passporting rights, these financial services exports from London to the EU have been central to London's competitiveness as an international financial centre and the wider importance of financial services in the UK's political economy. They have also provided a range of financial services to businesses and individuals in Europe. In this commentary, we examine the implications of Brexit for the financial services sector and for conceptual understandings of finance in economic geography and cognate social sciences. We argue that at the European scale, Brexit is giving rise to growing fragmentation of financial services to a range of European financial centres. Meanwhile, within the UK, finance is likely to become more concentrated in London as renewed processes of spatial concentration that have characterised previous economic shocks develop. Our analysis shows that that in order to understand these seemingly diverging geographies it is necessary to understand financial services as both economic and political practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for rethinking the economic geography of sharing and making in light of the recent proliferation of open innovation, makerspaces and maker movements. Using empirical research from an example of one such makerspace – Manchester's FabLab – and engaging with a range of geographical literatures on making, sharing economies, and digital fabrication, we develop a critical account of sharing in principle and in practice. The portrayal of open innovation spaces, such as FabLabs, as novel makerspaces of alterity and sharing is a common and underpinning theme in both academic and marketing literature (Aldrich, 2014; Anderson, 2012; Doherty, 2012; Fab Foundation, 2012; Gershenfeld, 2005; Suire, 2019). However, our findings suggest that the values espoused by the FabLab, of involvement, connection and affinity, are quite literally being revised and rejected by makers who use the space. Time, labour and knowledge were for the most part described by participants as precious commodities to be savoured rather than shared. Thus, while sharing is an ordinarily economic practice, this does not mean it is always, inevitably or evenly employed by economic actors and communities, especially within counter-cultural networks. If these are to be the economies of the future, we implore economic geographers to critically engage further with the complexities of and within maker spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits canonical thinking on international financial centres ( IFCs) that understands them as being primarily sustained through market liquidity, economies of competition and cooperation between financial and related professional services, and acting as interpretative nodes within global finance. In contrast, I explore the implications of foregrounding questions of power and politics in the (re)production of IFCs. Drawing on the case of the development of offshore renminbi markets in London's financial district, I argue the state plays a vital, yet comparatively neglected, role in shaping the development and changing nature of IFCs. In so doing, the paper calls for work in economic geography and cognate social sciences to understand finance as a political as well as an economic, social and cultural relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature within economic geography on the financialisation of everyday life has so far overlooked the role of family. Using data collected from ethnographic research with six families in the UK before and during the recent financial crisis, this article argues the case for using family as a lens through which to conceptualise everyday experiences of recession and finance. The findings highlight interpersonal family relationships, interand intra-generationality, gender responsibilities, reciprocity, shared experiences and memories as essential to conceptualising how people get by in times of financial crisis and relate to finance in everyday life. The conclusions outline the key contributions of the article to literatures on geographies of finance and family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use the case of the marketisation of higher education in England to contribute to the growing interest in placing markets, and processes of market making, more centrally within economic geographical research agendas. In particular, my argument focuses on the spatiality of marketisation through the specific case of the introduction of undergraduate student fees in England from 1998 onwards. I argue that the marketisation of English higher education has operated, implicitly at least, with a territorial logic in which students fees are justified through an assumption that the value of a degree from an English university will arise from graduate salary premiums in domestic graduate labour markets. However, I demonstrate how English higher education overflows this territorial framing through the internationalisation of student choice and graduate labour markets in ways that challenge the marketisation process itself. This analysis reveals the hitherto comparatively neglected role of extra-territorial relations in marketisation and the importance of these geographies for the future marketisation of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critical reviews section explores the implications of Brexit from a financial geography perspective in a number of different geographical settings. These range from the epicentre of Brexit in London's financial district, to its implications for the wider UK economy before extending the analysis to financial centres in Europe and Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report focuses on the intersection between finance and the 'real economy'. I begin by examining how political economy approaches to money and the wider financialization literature reveal the entangled relationship between finance and broader economic practices. I then review how recent work in economic geography has used these approaches to develop understandings of the role of financial circuits in everyday economic life and the implications of this for the international financial system. This research is important because it problematizes popular and policy calls to rebalance the economic activity in favour of the 'real economy'. I argue that this highlights the need to examine how financial circuits might be produced differently in order to develop a more sustainable financial system and associated economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this report, I examine the growing interest in financial subjects within economic geography and the wider social sciences. I begin by locating this literature within work on financialization and earlier geographical research on money and finance. I then review the contribution made by research into everyday and elite financial subjects to understandings of the geographies of money and finance. I argue that recent work examining the role of space and place in constituting financial subjectivities is particularly important in allowing geographers to engage with emerging academic and policy debates about the changing nature of financial subjectivities within neoliberal economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this report, I review the intersection between cultural economy and economic geography research on money and finance. To date, economic geographers have engaged most extensively with cultural economy work on the calculative practices that (re)produce the international financial system. However, I argue that there is scope for economic geography to broaden its engagement with this literature by developing understandings of the co-constitutive relationship between variegated geographical contexts and calculative practices. Such an approach is valuable because it responds to calls for cultural economy research to consider the political and normative dimensions of money and finance more fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals working in graduate labour markets are increasingly expected to enhance their employability and career progression by undertaking lifelong education and learning within the workplace. Research has examined how graduates navigate this dynamic educational landscape, but the changing nature of educational providers has been comparatively neglected. In response, in this paper we examine the growth of for-profit business education service firms that have grown to meet the increased demand for lifelong learning and education by focusing on the financial business education sector in London. We develop cultural economy approaches to market making in order to understand how these educational service firms have developed by 'stabilizing' new educational services and products that compete with, and seek to 'destabilise', more established forms of business education, particularly MBA degrees. In so doing, we position educational service firms as an important, yet hitherto neglected set of business services within economic geography. Moreover, by focusing on a relatively mature for-profit educational sector, the research presented in the paper has important implications for the development of educational landscapes beyond the case of financial business education as they become increasingly beholden to the activities of for-profit education service firms and wider discourses of markets in educational services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification in political and corporate circles of business education as a means of (re)producing highly skilled economic elites has been reflected by growing academic interest in the sector. However, this research predominately studies business education in isolation from other practices of learning. In response, I develop geographical perspectives on knowledge and learning to situate business education within broader landscapes of corporate knowledge circulation, production and learning. Positioning business education as a topic of geographical inquiry in this way is valuable since it fosters a more critical understanding of the role of business education within capitalist space economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper introduces the special issue ‘organisational geographies of power’ by examining the theoretical and empirical context for debates. It does this, firstly, with reference to existing theoretical work on what power is and does as well as work on the construction of power relations. Building on this, the paper then, secondly, examines the way relational and production network approaches have incorporated power into work on transnational corporations before, thirdly, considering how work on neoliberalism has studied the construction of spatial power relations. In doing this the paper highlights four important questions for future research relating to the practices and spatiality of power, the exercising of power and the situated effects of power relations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper argues that the conflicts of interest cases brought against Wall Street investment banks in the early 2000s were neither geographically nor institutionally isolated events. Rather, by combining recent work on financial knowledges in both economic geography and the social studies of finance with the growing interest in topological spatial imaginaries, I explore how London’s corporate finance industry was unable to distance itself from both the conflicts of interest allegations and the ensuing regulatory changes of the ‘Global Settlement’ in the US. Analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews conducted in London in the early 2000s is used to explore how a range of individual interests, institutional demands and structural changes within London’s financial district affected analysts’ ability to produce ‘objective’ research. As well as pointing to the problematic nature of certain aspects of knowledge rich ‘communities of practice’ [Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge], I explore how the resulting contingent and situated nature of research practice is at odds with a weakly defined notion of ‘objective’ research that underpins the Financial Services Authority’s regulatory response. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]