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As an increasing amount of manufacturing employment has relocated to the Global South, the developed economies of the Global North have sought new ways of competing within the global economy. In part they have done so through the promotion of the so-called `knowledge- based economy' (KBE) constituted by innovations and new markets in high-tech industries like telecommunication, information technology, and the life sciences. A KBE discourse has become a central plank of policy at the national and European levels. This raises a series of questions, however, about the ability of less-favoured regions to compete for knowledge-based activities, given existing conditions of uneven development and the unequal distribution of knowledge assets between regions in the developed economies. In this respect, particularly critical to regional out- comes are the forms of economic coordination and governance that emerge in knowledge-based commodity chains. Engaging with recent debates concerned with global commodity chains, this paper builds on the idea that economic governance is increasingly alliance driven, entailing a diverse set of geographies and trust-based relationships between a variety of organisations that include small innovative firms, large multinational corporations, and national (and subnational) policy actors. These forms of governance open up new opportunities for less-favoured regions, although these continue to be constrained by already existing power relations between regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has witnessed a revival of interest in the role of labour in political and economic restructuring. Following a period in the 1980s and early 1990s when trade unions and employees were routinely portrayed as passive victims of corporate restructuring, the past ten years have seen a resurgence of work by geographers highlighting the continued agency of labour. Despite this 'new labour geography', however, there has been little empirical research examining the uneven development of employment relations at a broad industry level. We address this issue by examining the changing geography of employment regulation in the UK's privatised rail industry. A major shift in the scale at which industrial relations are organised has taken place under privatisation, away from national collective bargaining to a system of localised company bargaining. On the basis of secondary data gathered from industry sources, we provide an initial assessment of key outcomes of employment change in the rail industry. Our analysis indicates that considerable disparities in pay and conditions exist between different groups of workers, companies, and regions, although these are perhaps less extreme than suggested by the unions. In addition, the number of industrial disputes has escalated in the aftermath of privatisation. Moreover, instead of the set piece national strikes that took place in the nationalised industry, the majority of this strike action has been conducted against particular operators at the local and regional scales, reflecting the logic of company-level bargaining. At the same time, the membership of the three main unions has actually increased in recent years against a backdrop of long-term decline, suggesting that the decentralisation of collective bargaining presents unions with opportunities as well as challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles on the evolving geographies of employment.

This article examines changes in employment relations in Great Britain's older industrial regions (OIR). In Great Britain, these changes have been most pronounced in those areas that are sometimes referred to as "Old Industrial Regions." Changes taking place in employment relations, both in the older industrial regions, and more generally, have been portrayed in various ways. It has been suggested that they represent the possibility for a new consensus on the shopfloor, in which labour is more fully incorporated into the decision making process. There was some variation in the culture of employment relations between places, reflecting the importance of different industries and employment experiences. In the coalfield areas, a more inclusive working class consciousness developed. Overall, it is clear that the production basis, and subsequently the character of employment relations in the OIRs, continued to be organized on the basis of extensive accumulation. The notion of a fundamental shift in employment relations is the norm for many of those studying processes of industrial restructuring in the OIRs during the past twenty years.