Corporate strategy, business strategy and activity location

Analysis of locational patterns and change within an industry may be assisted by division of industry participants into groups based on corporate and business strategies. These strategies reflect the assets of the companies and the characteristics of the industry. They affect the locational needs, behavior and impact of the companies. Hypothesized effects of strategy are explored in a brief study of U.S. semiconductor manufacturers. Of the possible strategic considerations, corporate diversification and integration, and business scale and cost/price position seem to be the most relevant for this industry.     

Multinational corporate product strategy, spatial diversification and nationalisation: A Guyanese comparison

The imlications of corporate product strategy and spatial structure for nationalisation by developing countries have been neglected. Corporate spatial diversification to reduce the importance of the target field unit in the corporate system is an important pre-requisite of frictionless divestment. But Guyanese nationalisation suggests that even after spatial diversification a vertically integrated, dominant product strategy confers less divestment capacity than a diversified, multi-product strategy. The product strategy classification used here may provide the necessary framework within which to explain the locational behaviour of multinational corporations.     

Trade unions, coalitions and communities: Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and the international stakeholder campaign against Rio Tinto

There is a growing geographical literature on the significance of organised labour. A key theoretical and political question concerns the extent and nature of the engagement between trade unions and other groups in the broader community. The paper seeks to contribute to this debate by focusing specifically on the ways in which trade unions engage collaboratively with such interest groups over international corporate campaign issues. It draws upon a case study of the encounter between Australia’s Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and Rio Tinto, one of the largest privately owned mining companies in the world. This was conducted through a loose alliance co-ordinated by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers Unions (ICEM). The campaign included the use of stakeholder reports aimed at influencing corporate shareholders. The main issues concerned the rights of indigenous peoples, environmental consequences of mining operations, and human rights in the workplace. The attempt to change these aspects of corporate culture led to union-inspired resolutions at the firm’s May 2000 Annual General Meeting, the first attempt to challenge a company through international union-led action in this manner. Although defeated, the resolutions were backed by a significant minority of leading institutional shareholders. The paper interprets this campaign in terms of broader debates over the spatiality of organised labour and the role of trade unions, at a time when increased significance has been attached to alternative political movements. It seeks to theorise the specific implications of internationally-grounded interest-based campaigns and take into account the ways in which these are both constrained by, and draw strength from, their constitution at this spatial scale.     

企业营销文化的塑造

营销文化是企业品牌文化中极其重要的子系统,是企业的精神财富。本文全面剖析了企业营销文化的内涵和企业文化创建中存在的问题,对企业营销文化中的文化理念、文化促销等在企业打造品牌塑造品牌中的重要性进行了探讨,并提出了企业营销文化的塑造对策。     

Influences on the location and behaviour of transnational corporations: Some examples taken from Japanese investment in Australia

This paper reviews previous approaches to studying transnational corporate locational behaviour in host countries. It is argued that an over-preoccupation with corporate bargaining power has obscured influences arising from: (a) the cultural and home country factors which influence transnational corporation (TNC) strategies and motivations; (b) the host country's physical, economic and regulatory environment; and (c) host government intervention in response to TNC activity. Case studies of Japanese post-war investment in Australia are given which indicate that final outcomes have evolved through interactions between corporate motivations and strategies, and local opportunities and constraints.     

Learning to trade ethically: Knowledgeable capitalism, retailers and contested commodity chains

This paper explores what happens when corporations engage explicitly in practices of organisational learning not only to become better capitalists by generating ever more innovative ways of maintaining profitability, improving competitiveness and maximising shareholder value, but also to become more responsible corporate citizens in their business practices. In particular, I evaluate the ways in which UK food and clothing retailers are learning to develop their ethical trading programmes in response to political calls for more responsible trading. Thrift’s [Thrift, N., 2005. Knowing Capitalism. Sage, London] notion of ‘knowledgeable, or soft, capitalism’ is adopted to understand the creative and experimental ways in which retailers and their mentors (ethical consultancies, social auditors and multi-stakeholder organisations) are learning to trade ethically. Two specific examples of formal learning spaces experienced by UK food and clothing retailers are examined: (i) training courses on social auditing and (ii) corporate awareness-raising courses on ethical trade. These courses are shown to encompass various participative and affective practices of learning. And while particular limits to the success of these courses are argued to exist, ethical learning practices discussed in this paper are nonetheless suggested to play a role in the making of new, albeit moderate, forms of responsible capitalism.     

The Asia-Pacific Rim's transport and telecommunications systems: spatial structure and corporate control since the mid-1980s

There is a need to move from discussing the Asia-Pacific Rim's leading port cities as shipping centres measured by container throughput. This shift in focus involves examining how different transport and telecommunications systems are interacting with each other at an international scale under the power and control of major world operators. Using a three-level network framework an attempt is made to illustrate and explain the formation of multilayered trade/communications corridors and hubs/headquarters in the Asia-Pacific Rim since the mid-1980s and to identify the factors affecting them. From this examination of spatial structure and corporate control three levels of cities in the Asia-Pacific Rim are recognised: first level cities with strong corporate representation in container shipping, air cargo, air passenger and telecommunications; second level cities with marked corporate representation in one but not all four modes; and third level cities with no marked corporate representation in any mode but with strong throughput. The third level includes the Asia-Pacific Rim's ‘true’ port cities. Perhaps the ambiguous category ‘port city’ should be reserved for them. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

企业文化的战略价值浅析

企业文化对企业长期经营业绩有着重要的影响,它很可能成为决定企业兴衰的关键因素,但是直到今天把企业文化发扬光大并成为核心竞争力的企业仍然是极少数。究其原因,主要是理论研究的多,企业家在实践中把企业文化建设当作一种自觉行动的少,没有把企业文化的价值上升到战略高度来加以认识,企业文化缺少核心思想和系统规划,缺乏对企业愿景的描绘,对职工群众缺乏吸引力和凝聚力,以至在市场竞争中难以发挥文化制胜的作用。如何把企业文化培育成一种不可复制的重要战略资源,笔者认为首先要对企业文化进行提炼,找出企业的核心价值观,系统策划企业文化内容,并在员工队伍及客户全体中持续宣贯培育,最终达到员工拥护、客户认同的目标,以文化的软实力为企业创造出硬价值。     

Flows of sediment,flows of insecurity: Climate change adaptation and the social contract in the Ebro Delta,Catalonia

To avoid dominant positivist explanations of links between climate change and security, I use alternative, human security approaches to study how climate security is managed in one of Spain’s most endangered coastal ecosystems, the Ebro Delta. I find that increasing the downstream flow of sediments retained in upstream dams is a crucial measure for dealing with climate change threats (sea-level rise) in the Delta. Yet, state policies do not increase sediment flow, but instead implement incremental adaptation at the site of climate impact (coast), which, at times, requires executing small-scale land expropriations. Refraining from improving human security via increasing sediment flow benefits corporate interests upstream. At the same time, expropriation silences mild farmer protest downstream and adds insult to injury by conveying to farmers a sense of blame for their vulnerability to climate change. Meanwhile, using expropriation at the service of incremental adaptation goes against the very rationale of expropriation established by Spanish legislation and creates a fundamental contradiction between what the practice is meant to deliver, namely security and the social contract from the part of the state, and what it actually does, i.e. permit the state to evade providing human security. I conclude that, under climate change, achieving human security, the delivery of the social contract, and corporate rent-seeking at the same time may not be possible. Moreover, rather than the social contract been threatened by state incapacity to respond to the effects of climate change and breached social contract expectations of vulnerable communities, it is the actual mobilisation of the contract in order to respond to climate change that diminishes human security.     

Constructing economic geographies from corporate interviews: insights from a cross-country comparison of retailer–supplier relationships

In the light of the significant role played by corporate interviews in the construction of contemporary economic geographies, this paper suggests that the practices of corporate interviewing in the research process demand critical reflection. These practices are reflected upon in the context of a comparative study of retailer–manufacturer power relations in the UK and USA. In particular, attention is paid to the ways in which corporate interviews actively construct knowledge of contrasting own-brand supply relationships in these national economies. To do this, the paper addresses the following issues: (i) the embeddedness of corporate interviews in a transforming economic geography; (ii) the processes of identifying, and gaining access to, own-brand supply networks in the UK and USA; (iii) the use of materials resulting from corporate interviews to produce nuanced understandings of own-brand supply relationships; (iv) the adoption of an appropriate textual strategy for writing such interview-based material into economic geography.     

Neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility: A political economy of corporate citizenship

In this paper we situate the rise of corporate social responsibility in the context of a re-casting of the boundaries between corporate- and state-centred regulation. We argue that this process can be understood in a theoretical framework of “rolling-out” neoliberalisation. We focus firstly upon an emergent CSR consultancy industry within the UK context, demonstrating that there is now a network of organisations dedicated to making profit out of socially-responsible corporate behaviour. These organisations have helped to re-define the nature and meaning of the private sector. Then we interpret global framework agreements on corporate behaviour (such as the UN Global Compact, the Equator Principles, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative) as examples of how neoliberalism is created in and through new “in-between” spaces that set the rules of political action. Subsequently, we note that some NGOs have recently recognised the limits on campaigning for more socially responsible corporate activity, and re-connect these concerns with longer-term debates on corporate voluntarism versus state-centred regulation. We conclude that demonstrating how hegemony is constructed in and through neo-liberalising corporate social responsibility remains to be fully explored, but argue that it is beneficial to consider the diversity of political projects involved in this ongoing process.     

Turbulent environments,corporate strategies and local employment perspectives

The paper attempts to bridge some of the gaps between (macro) regional-economic and (micro) corporate-geographic perspectives and research approaches. Local stakeholders of large manufacturing activities are tied to the corporate environment through complex linkages. Large corporations tends to perform various gate-keeping roles for the local community. External turbulence (e.g. in export markets) may be mitigated or accentuated by the decisions, strategies and spatial structures of the gate-keeping corporation. Examples are drawn from the aircraft industry and its particularly turbulent environments and significant local employment impacts.     

Financialization,totality and planetary urbanization in the Chilean Andes

In a context of planetary urbanization, where vast swathes of the countryside are being enclosed on an ongoing basis in order to support a sprawling urban system, the relationship between finance and land-use change needs to be brought to the forefront. By engaging with Henri Lefebvre’s ideas of levels and totality, this paper draws analytical connections between the financialization of the transnational mining industry and the production of the financialized urban everyday in geographies of extraction. The paper does this by looking at the case of Pascua Lama, a multibillion open-cast mine to be developed in Chile by a major mining company in the context of the current global gold rush. Through this case, I show how a set of strategies pursued by financiers and corporate managers thousands of kilometers away from the extraction site, resulted in fractured spaces of urbanization shaped by socioecological plunder, dispossession and geographically uneven financial landscapes.     

A risky business: Mining, rent and the neoliberalization of “risk”

Natural resource investment in the mining sector is often mediated through conflicts over rent distribution between corporate capital and landowner states. Recent rounds of neoliberal policy promoted by the World Bank have highlighted the need for landowner states to offer incentives in order to attract “high risk” capital investment. In Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, countries have been pushed to offer attractive fiscal terms to capital, thereby lowering the proportion traditionally called rent. This paper examines how the concept of “risk” has been mobilized to legitimate such skewed distributional arrangements. While certain conceptions of social and ecological “risk” have been prevalent in political and social theoretic discourse on mining, such focus elides the overwhelming contemporary power of our notion of “neoliberal risk” – or the financial/market risks – in actually setting the distributional terms of mineral investment. We illustrate our argument by examining the nexus of World Bank mining policy promotion and Tanzanian policy in the late 1990s meant to attract foreign direct investment in gold production. In closing, we suggest that just as “risk” is used to legitimate attractive fiscal terms for investment, recent events highlight how skewed distribution of benefits may set into motion risks that corporate capital had not bargained for.     

Strategic globalizing centers and sub-network geometries: A social network analysis of multi-scalar energy networks

Over the past three decades, a multitude of studies have examined the relational properties of corporate networks as a proxy for analyzing interurban hierarchies and structures. While this has been important in illuminating the nature of global connectivity, a significant conceptual lacuna exists in understanding how a multi-scalar analysis of interurban networks informs a more complete understanding of the geographies of globalization, and how cities within these networks act as regional globalizing centers. Building upon the theoretical and methodological foundations of ‘world city network’ (WCN) research, this paper investigates the corporate networks of the energy industry as a historic driver of globalization using social network analysis from an Australia geographical perspective. Globally and nationally scaled energy networks derived from the Platts and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) corporate lists are used to explore the convergence of nationally and globally articulated networks, and identify cities instrumental in the globalization of the national industry sub-networks. These are strategic ‘globalizing centers’ which, in contradistinction to ‘global cities’ or ‘world cities’ as broad classifications, play nuanced roles in anointing industry-specific circuits of capital and information. The analysis of two complementary yet distinct networks provides theoretical insight into how scale plays an integral role in defining/articulating interurban relations.     

Mining shareholder value: Institutional shareholders,transnational corporations and the geography of gold mining

The ownership and activism of institutional investors in large publicly traded gold mining companies have re-oriented business strategies toward maximising value for shareholders. This paper examines these strategies in the context of the commodity boom (and bust) of 2003–2015. A study of the activities of some of the largest gold mining companies reveals a re-alignment of their operations to satisfy the yield requirements, investment motives, and risk tolerance of institutional investors. By prying open the black-box of corporate decision-making, the expansion and subsequent contraction of mining activities are shown to have in part been enabled and constrained by the investment appetite of a particular class of investors. The findings make the case for a more situated analysis of corporations, a key but understudied actor in political ecology studies.     

Skilled migration in global cities from `Other' perspectives: British Arabs, identity politics, and local embededdness

Migration scholars increasingly have turned their attention to skilled migration, focusing, in particular, on the transfer of professionals within and between transnational corporations. Recent efforts have been made to bring a `cultural' analysis to this phenomenon, including greater scrutiny of the corporate cultures and social networks in which skilled migrants are embedded. This research has emphasised the importance of locality even among these most footloose and transnational of migrants. But despite these complex views of skilled migration, analyses have generated a somewhat limited conception of `skilled migrants' as managerial elites disengaged from local life. This paper examines skilled migration from a different perspective. First, using the case of Arab immigrants in London, this paper highlights the complicated nature of migration trajectories and reveals the diversity of patterns and experiences within the category of skilled migrant. Second, focusing on responses from female study participants, this paper examines the ways in which skilled migrants, rather than disengaging themselves from the host society context, may participate in the local politics of multiculturalism and integration.     

Voices and silences: the problem of access to embeddedness

The economic geography literature invokes a broad range of socio-cultural factors in explaining the performance of economic actors. The Polanyian–Granovetterian notion of embeddedness is among those often used in this context. This paper discusses epistemological problems involved in doing empirical research on the embeddedness of business firms in the local context. The obvious group of actors addressed in such studies are corporate managers. They can be depicted as agents who derive their power from the corporate resources that they control as well as from the social capital that they gain through their connectedness to a range of social relations.Interviews between academic researchers and corporate managers are viewed as Bakhtinian dialogues. They are analysed in terms of voice and silence, multivoicedness, social language and speech genre. Voices represent managerial elites in their different roles as well as the social relationships in which they are involved. They are resonated in managers’ utterances in interview dialogues. What is not expressed at all or is expressed unclearly or inadequately is captured by the metaphor of silence. Managers’ embeddedness in multiple sets of social relations results in multivoicedness, which leads to the need for the researcher to try to identify the different voices and their social origins.The paper elaborates on the complexities involved in carrying out empirical research on embeddedness. It can also be read as a warning against pursuing such an endeavour without careful conceptual elaboration on the very notion of embeddedness.     

Privacy, reconsidered: New representations, data practices, and the geoweb

Blogging, social networking, and other Web 2.0 practices have sparked widespread debate about the status and future of privacy. This paper examines an explicitly geographical aspect of Web 2.0 with respect to these debates: the geospatial web, or ‘geoweb’. As part of fundamental shifts in the kinds of geographic information available, its circulation, and representative forms it assumes, the geoweb implies new objects of privacy concern and subsequent privacy-related negotiations over the aggregate of its component information, technologies, and data praxes. Thus we argue that privacy must not only be revisited, but indeed re-conceptualized. Whereas prior research on privacy vis-à-vis geographic information technologies has tended to question what privacy ‘is’, we focus instead on the constitutive outcomes of societal struggles over privacy. We examine how privacy is being negotiated around two geoweb services - Google Street View and the Twitter GeoAPI - to illustrate that these contestations produce privacy as a social object in particular ways. We show that public discourse around actual or anticipated privacy harms stemming from geoweb services and their uses, as well as the preventatives and remedies proposed or implemented to address such harms, reconstitute the objects and practices of privacy concern, and alter the roles and relationships of state, civil and corporate actors in the construction of privacy. Finally we suggest that the geoweb raises new privacy concerns because some of its representational forms - namely geo-tagged images and self-authored texts - facilitate identification and disclosure with more immediacy and less abstraction.     

Location-based services,conspicuous mobility,and the location-aware future

The production and consumption of geographic information is becoming a more mobile practice, with more corporate actors challenging the traditional stronghold of Esri- and government-based geospatial developments. What can be considered a geographic information system has expanded to include web-based technologies like Google Earth/Maps, as well as more recent developments of Microsoft’s Bing Maps and the mobile version of ArcGIS available for the iPhone. In addition to these developments, a discursive shift toward ‘location’ is occurring across the Internet industry. Location has become the new buzzword for social-spatial strategies to target consumers. As reported in 2010, venture capitalists have, since 2009, invested $115 million into ‘location start-ups’ – software companies that provide location-based services to mobile computing consumers (Miller and Wortham, 2010). Applications like Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, and most recently, Facebook Places allow users to ‘check-in’ at restaurants, bars, gyms, retail outlets, and offices, thereby sharing their location within their social network. These developments enable consumers to (re)discover their proximities to products, while feeding a desire for making known one’s everyday movements. Here, I discuss the development of location-based services as the proliferation of a peculiar form of geographic information: conspicuous mobility. Through discussion of a recent gathering of location-aware software professionals and through analysis of discourses that emerge over a battle between ‘check in’ companies, I sketch an area of study that explores the implications of these emerging geographic information ‘systems’, and new everyday cartographers.