Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study will examine one of
the most important and least studied problems of trade and industrial
policy: whether and how governments have been able to prevent policies
designed to help one industry from hurting other industries, especially
exporters. This study focuses on the steel industry and two of its
major customers, automobiles and shipbuilding. Promoting the steel
industry was a central focus of trade and industrial policies in Japan
and many other countries in the postwar period. These countries also
tried to simultaneously promote steel-using industries such as
automobiles and/or shipbuilding, and turn them into successful
exporters. The key problem is that one of the main policies used to
promote steel, trade protection, raises its price, thereby hurting the
competitiveness of industries that use steel. This problem is
especially urgent if governments are trying to turn steel-using
industries into exporters, which cannot pass on the higher costs to
foreign customers. This study will compare the political process by
which this conflict of interest over trade and industrial policy was
dealt with in Japan to what happened in six other countries: South
Korea, Taiwan, Britain, Germany, Brazil, and the US. This diverse set
of countries adopted different sets of industrial and trade policies to
try to reconcile (or ignore) conflicting interests between steel
producers and consumers. Possible explanations for different policies
that this study will evaluate include political and economic
institutions, industrial organization, relative political strength of
the different industries, levels of development, and international
factors. I found that there is a broad pattern of steel-using
industries being compensated for higher steel prices by various means
in a wide range of countries in different stages of development.
Particularly in East Asian countries, great care has been taken to
avoid allowing protection for steel to hurt export industries that use
steel. Moreover, some governments successfully pressured “infant” steel
industries to “grow up” to be competitive in export markets, contrary
to the prediction of neoclassical economics that infant industries grow
politically powerful enough to retain protection indefinitely. It
appears that in major steel producing countries, there is a rough
balance of power between steel producers and steel-using industries,
although the costs of protection for steel are ultimately borne by
domestic household consumers. The approach taken here is very different
from most studies of industrial policy, which typically focus on only
one country and ask whether the policy succeeded in developing a
particular industry or not, without discussing the connections between
related industries.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The decentralization of production to meet globally distributed markets drove the creation of a financial network of global cities to manage and control the global regions of production. This financial network has since gained a relative autonomy, disembedding itself from the productive economy, an event unknown in recent history. This creates a set of contradictions between the social, the economic, and specifically the financial, which require specific socio-spatial strategies to manage the emergent crisis tendencies. The industrialized nations may be experiencing a decline of manufacturing, but it is growing globally with the rise of Newly Industrializing Nations. Globalization thus must be seen as a process, a process that is partial and tendential. From the perspective of globalization laid out in this paper, I hope to develop a concept of Actually Existing Post-Fordism. That would consist of exploring to what extent have Fordist relations given way to an emerging approach, be it flexible accumulation, New Regionalist, Global Node, Networked global regions, or the other forms not listed in this paper. My main concern, as with many of the authors discussed above, how does this complexity influence the spaces for action and the ability to make claims in what can be termed a geography of local power in a contemporary steel city.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Globalization is a subject conceptualized at many levels and within various theoretical frameworks which view it as an ongoing social, economic, and market processes. The mode of production, including the production process of a commodity, is a critical mechanism of the globalization of markets and industries as they produce organize and distribute commodities.
Adopting the global commodity chain framework, this paper looks at the globalization process of production in one of the core components to national modernization. Looking at the production process of steel, it is illustrated how a transition in commodity production – i.e. the role of recycling – profoundly affects the path on which an industry globalizes. In analyzing global and national data (U.S.) about the steel industry, it is apparent that this in an industry in the process of developing a global producer-drive commodity chain. The steel industry can be seen as a GCC whose governance structure is still conducted at the national level, where international remains a key process in developing a global process of production. Thus, this paper attempts to present a case study approach to the globalization of an industry and development of a GCC. Steel is a crucial commodity in the industrialization of nations, but it also an industry dependent on raw materials and a notoriously intense production process that is being transformed by the development of recycling as a major link in the production process.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the importance of collectivism to personal identity, and the role that this plays during a period of personal and collective crisis created by mass redundancy in the Welsh steel industry. The research findings demonstrate the importance of occupational identity to individual and collective identity formation. The apparent desire to maintain this collective identity acted as a form of resistance to the increased individualisation of the post-redundancy experience. It is argued that the continued concern for collective identity reflected efforts to avoid submergence in an existence akin to Gorz?s (1982) vision of the non-class of the post-industrial neo-proletariat. These findings therefore challenge the notion of the pervasiveness of individualism and the dismissal of collective orientations as important influences on identity formation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The financialization of work – or the growing importance of financial schemes in the workplace through pension funds, 401(k)s and Employee Stock Ownership Plans – calls for a rethinking of a conception of class that views labor and capital as diametrically opposed. As a result of capital investments made by employees, the boundary between labor and capital has become ambiguous, as working people formally become co-owners of the companies they invest in. In the case of the ESOP, the employee invests in the company for which he also works. Through a case study of the Weirton Steel Corporation, I will investigate how the broadening of corporate ownership has affected the political position of the employee inside the company. Weirton Steel became the largest American employee-owned company in 1984, after its employees bought their plant through an ESOP. The starting point of this paper is the assumption that the politics of the workplace does not only concern the material benefits of ownership and control, but also the representations of the actors involved: Who is seen as an owner and what does that ownership mean?

Based on an analysis of the discourse used in official company publications from the Irving Bluestone Collection at the Walter P. Reuther Library (Detroit, MI), I argue that the company challenged the distinction between labor and capital by creating a third category of employee-owner. As the Weirton steelworkers became employee-owners, the ESOP was no longer represented as a tool for job maintenance, but as a means for company survival. However, although the Weirton steelworkers took responsibility over the company by becoming owners, they still carried the entrepreneurial risk of that ownership as employees. Employees had to make substantial financial concessions to generate capital for the company and relinquish important political rights of labor. Therefore, although the category of employee was eliminated by the new employee-owner, the employee himself did not disappear from the workplace. The new category of employee-owner did thus not live up to its emancipatory potential, but rather weakened the political position of the employee vis-à-vis management and increased his vulnerability to the logic of the market.