Arbitrage spaces in the offshore world: Layering, ‘fuses’ and partitioning of the legal structure of modern firms

In this article, we discuss the way offshore financial centres are used by the multi-subsidiary, multi-jurisdictional group structure known as the ‘multinational enterprise’ to arbitrage between social geographies of political jurisdictions. We define arbitrage as the use of corporate legal entities located in diverse jurisdictions to arbitrate a third country's rules and regulations. Using a new method to categorize firm-level data from Van Dijk’s Orbis, we operationalize the notion of arbitrage to systematically detail and compare the structural sequencing choices firms are making, likely in part for reasons of arbitrage. We base our techniques on legal theory of the firm, acknowledging the underpinning of social technologies of law and accounting by which business enterprises are constructed and maintained. We conclude that two specific types of entities, ‘standalones’ versus ‘in-betweeners’, are qualitatively different from others in the activities they perform. We also highlight the existence of liability structures, or ‘fuses’, which typically take the form of a split ownership arrangement. Ultimately, we demonstrate that the position of a firm’s subsidiary within the overall network ecology of that firm is as important as its jurisdictional registration location.

A politics of placelessness? The limits of democratising memory in the Centro de Documentación e Investigación of Lima’s Lugar de la Memoria

The Centro de Documentación e Investigación (CDI) is an online archive which provides free access to over 20 collections on Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000), a conflict which was distinctly shaped by racial and social inequalities. The digital nature of the archive is presented as an opportunity for democratising access to these historical sources and for promoting commemoration as a means of cultural reconciliation. However, there is a risk that pre-existing social geographies and material concerns will mean that the CDI replicates offline exclusions. This article argues that, whilst the CDI has made these documents accessible to a broader geographical audience, usage of the digital archive is still largely mediated through social hierarchies. Through its online archive and offline engagement activities, the CDI appears to have generated a more geographically distributed network of content producers, but one which remains biased towards university-educated participants in urban areas.

Cyberplace: From fantasies of placelessness to connective emplacement

Digital memories have often been interpreted – both pejoratively and positively – as free-floating and placeless. On the one hand, digital technology is dismissed for creating a placeless sameness and meaninglessness: memories cut loose from the distinctive places in which they were formed and which gave them meaning. On the other hand, it is celebrated for creating a progressive placelessness in which memories may develop unencumbered by the restrictions, antagonisms and exclusivity of boundaries, borders and rootedness. Yet, an increasingly everted and pervasive 21st century Internet – and the rise of mobile and locative technologies – challenge the notion that place is significant to digital memory only in its absence. Digital memories are also personal and local memories, which are both marked by the contours of existing place politics and social geographies, and capable of reshaping these contours into new, heterogeneous and dynamic place-making. This is cyberplace: malleable, shifting, often disorientating; but also textured, uneven and located.

Mobile netware, social graphs, and the reconfiguration of space

Scholars are well-aware that the smartphone is much more than just a mobile telephone. A plethora of applications have been developed to run on smartphones, covering just about every aspect of human life. What is distinctive about the fact that these apps run on smartphones (as opposed to other kinds of devices) is that the smartphone makes them mobile (the apps travel with the user) and locative (the apps know the location of the user). As a result, smartphone applications that take full advantage of these characteristics have the ability to bring users together in real space and real time. The key to the success of such “netware” apps is their generation and retention of social graphs that connect their users both socially and physically. Netware apps like ride hailing that are built around mobility and location have the potential to dramatically restructure economic and social life by reconfiguring their users’ experiences of the physical and temporal world. We use ride hailing as a case study to illustrate how the new social geographies generated by mobile netware apps interact with physical geography to generate a new sense of space that can only be mapped by the companies that “own” our social graphs.

Social Geographies of Educational Leadership

Educational leaders across the globe are facing a growing set of challenges that include concerns around academic performance, but go well beyond to include the pandemic, equity, climate, and poverty. This is a defining time for leaders to attend to the needs of students in the face of ongoing and developing challenges. Better understanding how educational leaders engage with one another in developing community and accessing timely and context connected information is an important line of investigation during these challenging times. One of most widely used and simplest strategies is engaging communities through communication and collaboration in online spaces which involves accessing just in time information (e.g., news, ideas, approaches) and the exchange of information, knowledge, and strategies. Social media platforms provide multiple opportunities for these exchanges and yet we know very little about how educational leaders are engaging with these platforms. The rise of social media has led to a panoply of online communication spaces or sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, wherein individuals can engage into the informal learning with others. Furthermore, a growing number of studies have shown that educational professionals use social media, such as Twitter, to access and share information that helps them and others to face their everyday challenges. Being embedded in their immediate (work) environments, media constitute social opportunity spaces enabling individuals to engage discussions with a wide variety of others and stimulate a process of critical reflection. Consequently, educational leaders can benefit from participating in social media to help them (and their colleagues) in their efforts to engage in high quality practice. However, traditional views of leader activity have constrained work in the space. Leadership is one of the most examined concepts in the education literature, and while the study of online social networks is also gaining interest, the intersection between leadership and online social networks has received limited attention. The key notion underlying most traditional leadership research is that the behaviors or attributes of a leader, typically a person in a formal position, matter for a variety of outcomes. While offering valuable insights, this dominant view of leadership behavior and attributes underestimates the impact of (informal) social networks particularly those in online spaces. Scholars are increasingly recognizing the importance of social processes involved in leading. Leadership in its broadest sense has often been conceptualized as a process of influence toward an outcome. Social relationships through networks may provide leaders with the necessary infrastructure to access resources in achieving outcomes. A social network perspective brings to the fore the dependencies of actors within a social system. This perspective shifts the focus away from individual attributes toward an examination of the ties between individuals, thereby placing leadership directly in the role of a social undertaking. Leadership from a network perspective emphasizes the interdependence of action that are reflected by a network of ties, which may ultimately moderate, influence, or determine the activity and movement of resources such as practices and knowledge.

Organising care and community in the era of the ‘gay disease’: Gay community responses to HIV/AIDS and the production of differentiated care geographies in Vancouver

Scholarship on the place of the HIV/AIDS crisis in urban geographies of sexual minority activism has powerfully insisted on the importance of community organising as a response to state and societal failures and to their homophobic, AIDS phobic and morally conservative underpinnings. This paper extends this scholarship by examining the urban social geographies of exclusion produced by such community organising efforts. It draws on the perspectives of long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS (LTS) in Vancouver to highlight the differentiated care geographies of HIV/AIDS that resulted from the racialised, classed and gendered politics and urban imaginations enacted by gay and allied HIV/AIDS organising. Though LTS networks, spaces and politics of care and community were more extended than Vancouver’s gay community during the 1980s and 1990s, the centring of the West End gay village in many community-led responses to HIV/AIDS resulted in LTS geographies outside the West End being excluded from important systems of care and community. LTS narratives of the city at the time of the ‘gay disease’ thus tell an urban politics of sexual and health activisms as shaped not only by processes of heteronormativity and homophobia but also of racially, colonially and class-inflected homonormative urban imaginaries.