1,721,000 research outputs found
'It’s just a very male industry’: gender and work in UK design agencies
No full textThe article focuses upon gender divisions of labour in the UK design sector as a means of highlighting a relatively understudied segment of the creative industries. Drawing upon a wider study of design consultancy firms across London, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle, it considers how configurations of gender division are bound up with everyday representations of design labour. The article reveals how associations between craft, skill and masculinity appear and are reinforced in design practice. It also points to the ways in which design work is valorised within and through constructed geographies of difference between London and the regions, emphasising that hegemonic masculinities are reinforced and reproduced in reference to understandings of activities in plac
Book review: Origination: the geographies of brands and branding. Andy Pike. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. xii and 228 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, references, index. 89.95 cloth (ISBN 9781118556382); $31.99 electronic (ISBN 9781118556276).
No full textFlexibility and the gender division of labour: the restructuring of public sector employment in British Columbia
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Geographies of production III: knowledge, cultural economies and work (revisited)
No full textThe economic geographical literature continues to display a strong continuity of emergent themes. Assessments of knowledge, learning and innovation as well as cultural industries and the cultural economy have continued to attract significant attention. There also has been ongoing interest in work and employment dynamics, with a particular emphasis on the complex ‘intersectionality’ of subjects positioned by class as well as gender, race and other dimensions of identity. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of future directions which the study of geographies of production might take
Refurnishing homes in a bombed city: moral geographies of the Utility furniture scheme in London
No full textThe London Blitz was a catalyst for national state control of the entire commodity network for furniture; the only wartime commodity for which this was done. The Utility furniture scheme sought to manage material shortages and combat profiteering in the markets for new and second-hand furniture. It also responded to the vulnerability of the nation’s furniture producers, which were disproportionately concentrated in and around London. Set against the immorality of indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and illegal practices on the ‘black market’, the Utility scheme prescribed new moral geographies of equitable distribution based on need; of consumer rights protection; and of improvements to labour conditions and wages. The paper intervenes into debates about the social construction of moral geographies by examining the collective institutional response of the Utility scheme and the manner in which it sought to provision wartime homes
Sites of qualification: the motorcycle rider airbag and the production of safety
No full textThe paper mobilises the distinctive notion of ‘sites of qualification’ as a means of providing an expansive understanding of how innovative products are designed, produced and brought to consumer markets. We focus on the development of a new safety product for motorcyclists, the rider airbag, in which inflatable body protection is either incorporated into, or worn underneath, textile jackets and leather suits. The paper follows the airbag’s trajectory across a range of different sites, including lead firms and their territorial settings; MotoGP racetracks, mobile laboratories and professional riders; courts of law; and showroom and archive locations. The paper’s sites of qualification approach expands understandings of innovation by constructing a dialogue between two sets of literatures: actor-network approaches to the qualification of products; and narratives which understand economic innovation as emerging through clusters of agents and firms within industrial districts. The conclusion emphasises that sites of qualification are integral to the ways in which technical products such as the rider airbag are made social.</p
Gender, modern design, and home consumption
No full textBeset by a range of internal inconsistencies and contradictions, modernism never has been able to expunge completely that which has been constructed as its 'Other'. Often coded as feminine, notions of ornamentation, decoration, craft, and ephemerality have long been defined in opposition to the modernist project. In this paper we chart a return to the aesthetics of modernism in the retailing, marketing, and consumption of household furniture during the 1990s as a means of extending existing assessments of modernist discourses. Given past associations between modernism and masculinity, we critically evaluate contemporary shifts in home consumption in the context of the gendering of the modern
Geographies of the British government's wartime Utility furniture scheme, 1940-1945
No full textAbstractThe Second World War Utility furniture scheme represented a distinctive moment in the changing geographies of the twentieth-century British furniture industry. The scheme enabled the British state to direct the entire furniture commodity chain, from the regulation of timber supplies through to the management of final consumption. Whilst there has been some discussion of Utility within the context of modernism in design, the paper explores the broader historical geographies of Utility furniture. We demonstrate the ways in which state activity in wartime reconfigured socio-economic networks of production, distribution and consumption. The paper’s assessment of the Utility scheme reveals the importance of historical contingency in commodity chain dynamics as well as the role of the national state as a key organising agent
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