Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
contemporary time-space compression, the human body has lost its capacity
“to map its position in a mappable external world.”
Castells (1997), noting the pronounced degree to which postmodern capit-
alism relies on information as its primary resource, distinguished earlier
information
societies, in which productivity was derived from access to energy
and the manipulation of materials, from later
informational
societies that
emerged in the late twentieth century, in which productivity is derived pri-
marily from knowledge and information. In his reading, the time-space com-
pression of postmodernism was manifested in the global “space of
ows,”
including the three “layers” of transportation and communication infra-
structure, the cities or nodes that occupy strategic locations within these, and
the social spaces occupied by the global managerial class. He notes, for
example, that while people live in places, postmodern power is manifested in
the linkages among places, their interconnectedness, as personi
fl
ed by busi-
ness executives shuttling among global cities and using the Internet to weave
complex geographies of knowledge invisible to almost all ordinary citizens.
This process was largely driven by the needs of the transnational class of the
powerful employed in information-intensive occupations; hence, he writes
(1996:415) that “Articulation of the elites, segmentation and disorganization
of the masses seem to be the twin mechanisms of social domination in our
societies.” In this view, the city under the space of
fi
flows increasingly left
behind its former role as the center of embedded culture as it was eroded by
delocalized
fl
flows of information, capital, and people.
Contemporary globalization has undermined commonly held notions of
Euclidean space by forming linkages among disparate producers and con-
sumers intimately connected over vast distances through
fl
flows of capital and
goods. An important step in the theorization of space under these conditions
was the notion of commodity chains (Gere
fl
and Korzeniewicz 1994; Dicken
et al. 2001). Drawing from the earlier French tradition of
fi
filières
or value
chain analysis, commodity chains may be de
ned as networks of labor and
production processes that give rise to a particular commodity from raw
material to processing, delivery, and consumption. Commodity chains include
fl
fi
erent points or nodes, varying labor relations
across the length of the chain, di
flows of goods between di
ff
ff
erent constellations of production and
governance at each segment. Gere
erentiated between producer-
driven and buyer-driven chains, in which the power to control transactions
lay at di
(1996) di
ff
erent ends of the concatenated linkages. Such tools are useful in
dissecting, for example, the spatiality of transnational corporations, the dom-
inant producers of time-space today. In overcoming the arti
ff
cial separation
between production and consumption, commodity chains help to expose the
widespread commodity fetishism prevalent in advanced economies, exposing
commodities,
à la
Marx, as more than just things but as embodiments of
social processes and thus helping to expose the unequal power relations
among places that lie in the creation of goods. Chains are hence simul-
taneously geographical, economic, political, and cultural. They lie at the
fi
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