This article explains how temporally uneven polycrisis reshapes labour agency within apparel production networks. Developing a spatial–temporal analytical framework, it shows how interactions, amplification, and acceleration across crises reconfigure workers’ opportunity structures through legitimacy, profitability, and social reproduction pressures. This qualitative case study of Bangladesh’s apparel industry examines how the Rana Plaza accident, COVID-19, and the climate crisis interacted to produce cumulative effects that enabled openings and constrained mobilization, shifting labour agency across associational, coalitional, and micro-practices over time. The study advances labour regime analysis by demonstrating the temporal contingency and spatial situatedness of labour agency during polycrisis.
Proximity is traditionally viewed as crucial for overcoming the search and transfer costs associated with imperfectly codified knowledge. But does proximity still matter when formal standard publication jointly enhances the codification, certainty, and accessibility of technical knowledge? Evidence from the U.S. Information and Communication Technology industry shows that technological proximity drives substantial spillover gains, largely irrespective of location. Conversely, geographical proximity confers a compensating advantage when technological proximity is low. We reveal a nuanced interplay of proximity in knowledge spillovers: while formal standardization effectively flattens the world for the technologically proximate, co-location remains vital for their less proximate counterparts.
Abstract Where should we build new housing under growing climate hazards? This study develops a framework that balances the economic benefits of density against the geographically varying costs of climate adaptation. We apply it to the Netherlands, where demand for new housing is high, but much of the land lies in floodplains or subsidence-prone areas. Agglomeration benefits are proxied by land values, while adaptation costs are derived from engineering estimates of flood protection and soil subsidence. Combining these data allows us to map spatial trade-offs and identify where development remains welfare-enhancing. Our findings show that dense cities continue to generate strong net welfare gains, even in places with high costs, while low-density settlements generate a welfare loss for new housing. We identify density thresholds above which housing development becomes feasible. Many medium-sized Dutch cities already exceed these thresholds, making densification more beneficial than peripheral expansion. Climate adaptation thus strengthens—rather than weakens—the case for urban densification.
Abstract The global production networks (GPNs) literature, with the instructive concept of strategic coupling, has attended to commercial production, often bracketing out social reproduction. This leaves a conceptual and analytical gap around uneven outcomes emerging in strategic coupling processes. The paper therefore turns to global reproduction networks (GrPNs) and engages with the concepts of power and ambivalence, and with convention theory to develop the ambivalence framework. The framework builds on the co-constitution of production and social reproduction in which imperatives, such as price and efficiency, well-being, nurturing, and altruism, co-exist. It turns the conceptual-analytical focus to decision-making on training, where these imperatives are ranked and generate outcomes for training and beyond. The explanatory potential of the framework is sketched with a vignette of organic rice farming in Viamão, Brazil.
Abstract Research on innovation beyond metropolitan cores has paid less attention to whether peripheral participation is matched by formal ownership of patents on key technological paths. We distinguish spatial and network participation from the headquarters geography of patent applicants, and apply kernel density, core–periphery network, and main-path analyses to sixty-two Japanese Green Transformation technologies. Four technology participation configurations emerge. Yet most main-path patent–firm links involve firms headquartered in Japan’s three major metropolitan areas. The study highlights that participation in main technological paths differs from ownership, which marks the tensions between core and peripheral configurations of inventive activity.
