Time for change: Corporate conventions, space–time and uneven development

The corporation remains a critical agent in the production of geographically uneven development. Furthermore, time is critical to the practices and deliberations taking place within corporations, yet it has been underappreciated within prominent economic geographical analyses. This article argues for the examination of the ‘black box’ of the corporation, as a site producing uneven development, and through which the temporalities of decision-making and deliberation are critical. Combined with the temporal insights of Harvey’s ‘social’ and ‘experiential’ space–times, conventions theory is utilised to elucidate the importance of the corporate deliberations and practices that come to produce uneven development. A conventions approach importantly provides a framework in which to examine the role of both conventionalised behaviours and how conventions are used in heterogeneous experiential space–time deliberations and decision-making and how this is interwoven with social spaces–times. Such an approach is critical in conceptualising the corporation as a deliberative social and experiential space–time series of sites and through which it is reified as a temporary instantiation.

Emptying the Chamber Pot

In popular fiction and many scholarly works, courtiers are represented as masters of the art of dissimulation, cynical and self-serving, ready to turn their backs on anyone who has lost royal favour. This chapter challenges those assumptions by looking at the reaction of family groups and wider networks of friendship or clientele to disgrace. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, families rose and fell as a kinship group, and when confronted by the disgrace of one of their members the collective response was to rally in order to save social, financial, and political status. Friendship too proved far more durable than the stereotype of the courtier might lead us to predict, and by examining the conventions, theory, and actual practice of friendship in times of adversity this chapter offers new insight into noble sociability.

Competition, adaptation and mutation

The speed at which international supermarkets chains have integrated themselves into Thai diets and food practices is without prior historical precedent. This article uses ethnographic data from Chiang Mai, Thailand, to examine how values surrounding food and food cultures are being sustained, are adapting and are being transformed. It examines both supermarkets and fresh markets as places where the values unfold in different ways. In discussing the sometimes competing, intermingling and mutating values, a Conventions Theory approach is adopted. The theory facilitates a discussion of the monetary, social and cultural evaluations of Chiang Mai’s food markets. In doing so it is argued that the conventions theoretical approach could usefully be extended from western settings to take account of non-western development trajectories and culture-economy interdependencies.

Networks, Conventions, and Regions: Theorizing ‘Worlds of Food’

Food is a long-standing productive activity which carries a number of different production and consumption attributes. However, much of the recent literature focuses on a limited number of such attributes—namely, the transformation of the food chain and, more in general, of production sites. In particular, much attention has been paid to globalization, the growing power of transnational corporations and their relentless exploitation of nature. In this chapter we argue that this kind of focus is not alone sufficient to account for the growing complexity of contemporary agri-food geography. Growing concerns about food safety and nutrition are leading many consumers in advanced capitalist countries to demand quality products that are embedded in regional ecologies and cultures. This is creating an alternative geography of food, based on ecological food chains and on a new attention to places and natures, that, as we will see in Ch. 3, reveals a very different mosaic of productivity—one that contrasts in important respects with the dominant distribution of productive activities so apparent in the global food sector (Gilg and Battershill, 1998; Ilbery and Kneafsey, 1998). Our aim is to develop an analytical approach that can aid our understanding of this new agri-food geography and can introduce a greater appreciation of the complexity of the contemporary food sector. To this end, we begin by considering work on the globalization of the food sector and by showing that recent analyses have usefully uncovered some of the key motive forces driving this process—most notably the desire by industrial capitals both to ‘outflank’ the biological systems and to disembed food from a traditional regional cultural context of production and consumption. After considering the recent assertion of regionalized quality (which can be seen as a response to the outflanking manoeuvres inherent in industrialization), we examine approaches such as political economy, actor–network theory, and conventions theory that have made significant in-roads into agri-food studies and have revealed differing aspects of the modern food system.