Blackwell Reference Online

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Labor is at the same time “the most fundamental and the most inherently problematic of all economic categories” (Block, 1990, p. 75). Contemporary economic geography now takes it as axiomatic that work and workplace restructuring are inherently social processes, that labor markets are structured by power relations and institutional forces, and that above all these are social-spatial phenomena. But it was not always so. Neoclassical economics maintained that labor, which after all is bought and sold on labor “markets,” should be regarded like any other commodity. Along with capital and raw materials it is simply another “factor input” to the production process, whose price (wages) will fall when supply exceeds demand and rise when there is a shortage of workers, and so forth. When economic geography was in thrall to neoclassical economics, back in the 1960s and 1970s, this was how labor was conceived. As just another economic variable, labor represented little more than an accounting line in the calculus of industrial location, its price and availability routinely quantified and mapped. In these ostensibly apolitical accounts, labor was rendered an unproblematic category. Workers did not seem to strike, raise children, or make creative inputs into the production process. And while the economic geographers of the time might study journey-to-work patterns, they rarely delved into what ... log in or subscribe to read full text