The Dictionary of Human Geography (110 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
4.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
labour process
The means through which labour power is extracted from workers: the phrase originates in marxism, though it refers more broadly to the organization of work. Be they in the field, factory or filing department, when workers are employed, they enter into a labour process through which their work is organized and surplus (which is realized as capitaL) is extracted. As such, writers who use this phrase are often doing so with a focus on power relations in the workplace: they have an interest in the relationship between managerial control, technologies of work, subjectivity and workers? resistance. Research into the labour process exploded with the publication of Braverman?s (1974) Labor and monopoly capitalism, which sug gested that the de skilling of work was the dominant tendency in the capitalist mode of production. Geographers, however, played very little part in this subsequent explosion of work on de skilling. Instead, these ideas about the labour process have been manifest in de bates about spatial divisions of Labour. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In her seminal work, Spatial divisions of labour, Massey (1984) highlighted the ways in which the drive for profitability leads corpor ations to reconfigure the geography of their operations, breaking up and stretching out the labour process across space. Thus, man agerial functions tend to be separated from those of manual labour and, increasingly, companies have developed complex structures of production at global dimensions. In what have been called global commodity chains, many of the largest transnationaL corpor ations now take advantage of a complex and fast changing international division of labour, using subcontracted production and service delivery companies to reduce costs, minimize risk and increase flexibility (Dicken, 2003; Hale and Wills, 2005). As such, the labour process has a very clear geography, in which the map of manufacturing and, increasingly, service industries (such as call centres) is organized at a global scale. The separation of control from production raises a number of important questions about responsibility and power. Workers are generally disempowered by this extension of corporate geography and the spatial reorganization of the labour pro cess. As a result, trades unions are experiment ing with new forms of internationalism and are attempting to forge alliances with consumers to find new sources of power (see Labour geography). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ultimately, geographers have sought to root understandings of the labour process in pLace, highlighting the way in which the labour process changes social relations and political possibilities within and between dif ferent locales. jwi (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Burawoy (1979). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
labour theory of value
A cornerstone of classical economics, prominent in the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The work of the French Physiocrats (notably Francois Quesnay and the elder Mirabeau) was a prox imate influence on Smith?s formulation of a labour theory; more distantly, the writings of the proto liberal philosopher John Locke, especially his Second treatise on government (1681), were a likely influence. In his moral political theory, Locke defended the virtues of individual labour, the sanctity of property acquired by mixing labour with objects and the natural rights of individuals and conceived for the state the limited but critical role of regulating and securing private property (see liberalism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Why have a labour theory of value at all? For one, Locke?s version of the labour theory pro vided no indication of how to bring into equivalence different forms of private property within a generalized exchange economy. Adam Smith?s version of the labour theory attempted exactly that: his purpose was to demonstrate the ?natural price ... [or] the central price, to which the prices of all com modities are continually gravitating? (1991 [1776], p. 61), or in other words, their intrin sic worth above and beyond the ephemeral fluctuations of market price. This, of course, begged the question: Which commodity (NEW PARAGRAPH) served as the natural basis of all others? During the early industrial era (see industriaL revoLution), it was tempting to infer that ?labour? was the common basis of all exchanged goods. But neither Smith, nor Ricardo, who adopted his labour theory, could resolve a basic contradiction; namely, what the natural price of labour should be. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Karl Marx made the breakthrough. He drew a distinction between the ?use value? and the ?exchange value? of a commodity, and des ignated ?labour? as use value and ?labour power? the actual commodity transacted between employers and employees as ?exchange value?. This in turn allowed him to claim, without contradiction, that in a capital ist mode of production (see capitalism), ?labour power? as a commodity had both a market price and an underlying value, which was the socially necessary labour time necessary for its (re)production. Capitalists purchased ?labour power? in order to consume its use value, ?labour?, which had the unique capacity to produce more value than necessary for its reproduction in short, ?surplus value?. Hence, in one fell stroke, Marx was able to resolve the contradiction that had plagued Smith and Ricardo, recuperate the labour the ory of value, and provide a basis for capital accumuLation as the accumulation of sur plus value. Notice that Marx did not seek a ?natural price? explanation; rather, he clearly inserted the adjective ?socially necessary? in order to indicate the geographical, historical and relational basis of value. Marx?s labour theory of value was subsequently attacked on several fronts, most persistently around its ostensible failure to systematize the relation ship between value and market price the so called ?transformation problem?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Diane Elson?s (1979) innovative reading of Marx?s theory of value which David Harvey endorses in Limits to capital (1999 [1982]) circumvents both the critique that Marx?s for mulation stands and falls on labour being the physical substance of value as well as the transformation problem by arguing that what Marx really intended was to draw attention to the rationalizing practices whereby labour in a capitalist mode of production is continuously enrolled in abstracted form through the wage/ money relation. This not only involves a discip lining of labour through surveillance, monitor ing, punishment and incentive contracts; but, more pointedly, these mechanisms are to be themselves viewed as symptomatic of a system of generalized commodity exchange that is, a dominant and more or less competitive market system where wealth and worth are measured in an impersonal, abstract money form. Thus, a ?value theory of labour?, as Elson presents it, is a condensed expression of the imperative for capitalists to constantly cut labour costs and raise labour productivity in order to survive, and for workers to become continuously more productive at their tasks in order to not become dispensable. In Elson?s words: ?My argument is that the object of (NEW PARAGRAPH) Marx?s theory of value was labour. It is not a matter of seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding that it is labour [thus, Elson sidesteps the nettlesome ?trans formation problem?]. But rather of seeking an understanding why labour takes the form it does, and what the political consequences are? (1979, p. 123). vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Althusser (1997 [1970]); Cohen (1978); Elson (1979); Engels (1978 [1884]); Postone (1996); Read (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Lamarck(ian)ism
A theory of evolutionary change originating with the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744 1829). A non Darwinian doctrine of organic progres sion, early Lamarckism differed significantly from its later Neo Lamarckian successor. The dynamic behind Lamarck?s own scheme of evolution along separate lines of development, rather than by common descent, was the active power of nature (combining processes of environmental stimulus, the adaptive habits of organisms in adjusting to modified condi tions, and the use and disuse of organs) to impel life along predetermined sequences (Burkhardt, 1977). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the decades around 1900, when Darwin ism was in eclipse as a consequence of a series of criticisms within the scientific community, the Lamarckian mechanism of the inheritance of acquired characteristics achieved considerable support as providing an alternative mechanism for evolutionary transformism (Bowler, 1983). This marginal component of Lamarck?s ori ginal scheme became the central plank in Neo Lamarckian interpretations of evolutionary change, which routinely considered that those organic modifications on which natural selec tion operated were environmentally induced. Particularly in the USA, but also in Britain, this alternative evolutionary theory attracted widespread support during the second half of the nineteenth century despite the absence of agreed empirical corroboration. Particularly prominent were the palaeontologists Edward Cope and Alpheus Hyatt, the geologists Joseph LeConte and Clarence King, and the Duke of Argyll and George Romanes in anthropology and psychology. In France, the Soci?t? Zoologi que d?Acclimatation under Isidore Geoffroy St Hilaire vigorously promulgated Lamarckism in projects on environmental adaptation that had implications for human migration and coloni alism (Osborne, 1994). Most dramatic of all was the theory?s official endorsement in the (NEW PARAGRAPH) Soviet Union during the 1930s, where T.D. Lysenko used Lamarckism to justify his ideas about agricultural improvement and judged that it fitted more comfortably with Marxist political ideology than did classical neo Dar winism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Like Darwinism, Lamarckism also had social implications. Indeed, many social evolutionists drew more inspiration from Neo Lamarckian dogma than from standard Darwinism. For some, it provided grounds for looking to environment as the driving force behind social processes; for others, who were enthusiastic about the role it attributed to mind and will, it reserved space for psychic elements in evolution and thereby enabled them to es cape the pessimism that gripped many at the beginning of the twentieth century. Either way, Lamarckism could be mobilized to justify the politics of social and political interventionism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Given its various enthusiasms, it is not sur prising that a number of geographers would find Neo Lamarckism attractive, not least because the environment played such a key directive role in the scenario (Livingstone, 1992). In the USA during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous advo cates of environmental determinism, such as Nathaniel Shaler, W.M. Davis, Ellen Semple, Albert Brigham and Ellsworth Huntington, displayed Lamarckian sympathies and used the theory to provide naturalistic readings of human culture. Similarly Turner?s frontier thesis, which portrayed American society as recapitulating the stages of social evolution with each advance of frontier settlement, drew inspiration from Lamarckian environ mentalism (Coleman, 1966). Griffith Taylor in Australia found it equally attractive, though he did not discount the significance of Men delian genetics (Christie, 1994). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In late Victorian Britain, similar convictions are discernible among those sympathetic to Lamarckism?s emphasis on the significance of consciousness. Patrick Geddes used it to advocate various urban planning and educa tional reforms on the grounds that their bene fits would accumulate, by social inheritance, in successive generations; Peter Kropotkin, critical of the cut throat ethics of capitalist competitive struggle, found in Lamarckism the grounds for a more benign social order a mix of anarchism and humANism built upon mutual aid (Todes, 1989); and Andrew Herbertson and H.J. Fleure both mobilized the idea in their considerations of regional geog raphy. Lamarckian motifs have also been dis cerned in Paul Vidal de la Blache?s possibilism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) More generally, Neo Lamarckism facilitated geography?s transition from a natural theology framework to that of evolutionary naturalism largely due to the ease with which it could be given a teleological reading (Livingstone, 1984: see teLeoLogy). Its impact on the evolution of geography around the time of the subject?s pro fessionalization was thus very considerable (see geography, history of). Dm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bowler (1983); Campbell and Livingstone (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Stocking (1962). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
land tenure
The practices through which land is possessed. Land tenure entails both formal property rules and rights, sanctioned by some collective, and more symbolic and culturally coded forms of, land attachment. Land, in particular, is both an object with use value, and a symbol endowed with meaning. Scholars of land tenure tend to emphasize the latter, noting the significance of complex, ritu ally reproduced relations of land holding. Land is often spoken of as an active agent, encompassing the interests of the living and the dead. Rules governing access and use rights are embedded within complex and often highly localized lifewonds (Hann, 1998). Land tenure should be distinguished from housing tenure that is, the variegated ways in which people acquire rights in real property hence the distinction between rent ers, private owners, leasehold tenants, and so on (see housing cLass). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Scholarship has tended to emphasize tenurial relations amongst peasant and hunter gatherer communities, located in the premodern history of the West, or within the contemporary developing world. However, it should be noted that culturally laden and often collectively oriented forms of land holding can be found within the modern West, as noted by some of the contributions in Abramson and Theodossopoulos (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Land tenure, as a means through which a pLace is known and represented, and a social order enacted and sustained, is clearly geo graphical. One interesting strain of scholarship concerns the ways in which landscape as both a material and representational resource con nects to land tenure (Olwig, 2002). Another crucial dimension concerns systematic at tempts at the remaking of land tenure, of which Western colonial displacements of in digenous property (see colonialism), state col lectivization or individualization of land holding, the enclosure of the commons, (NEW PARAGRAPH) and clashes between agrarian and hunter gath ering societies are all examples. The geograph ies of these often violent reworkings (Peluso and Watts, 2001), and associated forms of resist ance (Peluso, 2005), have been compellingly documented. nkb (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

Broadchurch by Erin Kelly, Chris Chibnall
Preloved by Shirley Marr
Blythewood by Carol Goodman
Bridge for Passing by Pearl S. Buck
You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner
His Yankee Bride by Rose Gordon
Parlor Games by Leda Swann