Wiley: Economic Geography: Table of Contents

2014–2015 Reviewers

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Economic Geography, Volume 91, Issue 4, Page 523-524, October 2015.

Annual Contents

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Economic Geography, Volume 91, Issue 4, Page 525-527, October 2015.

Bounded Entrepreneurial Vitality: The Mixed Embeddedness of Female Entrepreneurship

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Abstract

Despite the recent increased interest in female entrepreneurs, attention has tended to focus on dynamic individuals and generic incentives without considering the roles of gender and place in entrepreneurship. In this article, we draw on the notion of mixed embeddedness to explore how time-and-place–specific institutional contexts influence women's entrepreneurship. Drawing on primary data collected in Ghana, where exceptionally more women engage in entrepreneurial activities than men, we examine the scale and characteristics of female entrepreneurial activity, exploring the factors that account for this strong participation of women, and examine whether this high entrepreneurial rate is also reflected in their performance and growth aspirations. The findings reveal a disjuncture between, on the one hand, the vibrant entrepreneurial endeavors of Ghanaian women and positive societal attitudes toward female entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, female business activities characterized by vulnerability and relatively low achievement. The article shows how regulatory, normative, and cultural–cognitive institutional forces, which have been transformed over time by local and global processes and their interaction, are concomitantly propelling and impeding women's entrepreneurial activities. We propose that the study of female entrepreneurs within economic geography could be advanced by analyzing the differing effects of the complex, multiple, and shifting layers of institutional contexts in which they are embedded.

New Regimes of Responsibilization: Practicing Product Carbon Footprinting in the New Carbon Economy

Jim Ormond — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

This article discusses how by voluntarily adopting new dimensions of corporate responsibility—for the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by its products—global retailers not only position their organizations as responsible in the battle to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of their consumers, but also articulate a new solution for the mitigation of climate change aligned with their commercial interests. As part of this solution, retailers (and other brands) reimagined how GHG emissions should be allocated—shifting from a productionist-based to a consumptionist-based perspective—and redefined what they are responsible for and what their supply chains must care about. The article argues that the complexity involved in engaging tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual organizations across numerous products’ supply chains means that requirements to measure and reduce a product's carbon footprint cannot, and are not, simply pushed down a supply chain. Rather through a confluence of the practices of translation, observation, and normalization retailers are creating, fostering, and articulating new regimes of responsibilization within which actors across successive tiers of a product's supply chains must measure, monitor, and reduce their own carbon footprints independently, conscientiously, and diligently, thereby enabling retailers to achieve carbon reductions at a distance. Seen through the Foucauldian-inspired lens of the technologies of the self and self-government under neoliberal governance regimes, this article suggests that, through the control of what is in a product's carbon footprint, how this should be measured, and how it should be reduced—what are called here carbon truths—global retailers are working to consolidate their socioeconomic powers as sustainability leaders that fundamentally direct society's response to, and mitigation of, climate change.© 2014 Clark University

Balanced Skills and the City: An Analysis of the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Skill Balance, Thickness, and Innovation

Elisabeth Bublitz, Michael Fritsch, Michael Wyrwich — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are assumed to be multiskilled, covering a number of skills and achieving in each skill a level as high as possible. Being such a jack-of-all-trades increases the probability of running an entrepreneurial venture successfully, but what happens to the jack-of-few-trades who lacks sufficient skills? This article investigates a possible compensation mechanism between balanced skills and cities and how this compensatory measure relates to performance. Specifically, we test and find support for the idea put forward by Helsley and Strange that high market thickness, such as that found in cities, can compensate for a lack of entrepreneurial skill balance. The results indicate that entrepreneurs with low skill balance benefit more from being located in cities than their counterparts with high skill balance. Innovative firms do not differ from other businesses in this respect.

European Migration, National Origin and Long‐term Economic Development in the United States

Andrés Rodríguez‐Pose, Viola von Berlepsch — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Have Irish, German, or Italian settlers arriving in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century left a trace that determines differences in economic development to this day? Does the national origin of migrants matter for long-term development? This article explores whether the distinct geographic settlement patterns of European migrants according to national origin affected economic development across U.S. counties. It uses microdata from the 1880 and 1910 censuses in order to identify where migrants from different nationalities settled and then regresses current levels of economic development on settlement patterns according to national origin, using both ordinary least squares and instrumental variable approaches. The analysis controls for a number of factors that would have determined the attractiveness of different U.S. counties at the time of migration as well as current levels of development. The results indicate that while there is a strong and positive impact associated with overall migration, differences in the quality of the institutions of the countries of origin of the migrant are not necessarily a good predictor for current levels of economic development of U.S. counties.

Global Capitalism and the Crisis of HumanityBy William I. Robinson New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Richard Peet — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Economic Geography, Volume 91, Issue 4, Page 513-514, October 2015.

After the CrisisBy Alain Touraine Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014 (first published in French, 2010).

Costis Hadjimichalis — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Economic Geography, Volume 91, Issue 4, Page 515-517, October 2015.

Akustisches Kapital: Wertschöpfung in der Musikwirtschaft [Acoustic Capital: Value Creation in the Music Economy] Edited by Bastian Lange, Hans‐Joachim Bürkner, and Elke Schüßler Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2013.

Melanie Fasche — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Economic Geography, Volume 91, Issue 4, Page 519-521, October 2015.

What's Wrong with the WTO and How to Fix It By Rorden Wilkinson Cambridge: Polity, 2014.

John Agnew — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Economic Geography, Volume 91, Issue 4, Page 509-511, October 2015.