Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.

The idea of “place” has become a topic of growing interest in environmental ethics literature. I explore a variety of issues surrounding the conceptualization of “place” in bioregional theory. I show that there is a necessary vagueness in bioregional definitions of region or place because these concepts elude any purely objective, geographically literal categorization. I argue that this elusiveness is in fact a great meritbecause it calls attention to a more essential “subjective” and experiential geography of place. I use a (...) reading of Aldo Leopold’s Sand Country Almanac as an example of the value of a non-literalistic geography for the understanding of place. (shrink)

Over the past decade or so a number of historians of science and historical geographers, alert to the situated nature of scientific knowledge production and reception and to the migratory patterns of science on the move, have called for more explicit treatment of the geographies of past scientific knowledge. Closely linked to work in the sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies and connected with a heightened interest in spatiality evident across the humanities and social sciences this 'spatial turn ' (...) has informed a wide-ranging body of work on the history of science. This discussion essay revisits some of the theoretical props supporting this turn to space and provides a number of worked examples from the history of the life sciences that demonstrate the different ways in which the spaces of science have been comprehended. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in other disciplinary fields. Second, it reinterprets some exemplary economic sociology studies by using the relational work lens to clarify the concept’s utility for empirical analysis. Third, it speculates about the place of relational work in the theoretical toolkit of economic sociologists, in particular its relation to embeddedness. The paper (...) concludes by arguing for the utility of the concept to integrate structural, cultural, and power-focused analyses of economic life, to highlight the often-overlooked role of emotions in economic exchange, and to ground an alternative to rational action theory in economic sociology. (shrink)

In this article, the ability of partnerships to generate goods that enhance the quality-of-life of socially and economically deprived urban communities is explored. Drawing on Rawl's study on social justice [Rawls, J.: 1971, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, Cambridge)] and Sen's capabilities approach [Sen, A.: 1992, Inequality Re-Examined (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA); 1999, Development as Freedom (Oxford University Press, Oxford); 2009, The Idea of Justice (Ellen Lane, London)], we undertake an ethical evaluation of the effectiveness of different (...) approaches to partnership activity in city neighbourhood regeneration. We focus, in particular, on their impact on the social regeneration of disadvantaged communities. Governance of cross-sector partnerships, built upon negotiated values and strong community voice, may result in a greater sense of procedural justice, as well as improvements to orderliness in local neighbourhoods. However, distributive justice, the accumulation of, and access to, goods that enable greater participation in society, remains largely elusive within neighbourhood partnership activity. We conclude that social provision that deals fairly with the causes of disadvantage by enhancing the capabilities of local communities and increasing social capital is likely to be a more effective and sustainable approach for partnerships, despite being a longer-term and more costly endeavour. (shrink)

This article seeks to analyse the rise of ‘resilience ethics’, in terms of the shift in ethical approaches away from the hierarchical liberal internationalist constructions of the 1990s and towards broader and more inclusive understandings of ethical responsibility for global problems. This shift in ethical attention away from the formal international politics of inter-state relations and towards the unintended consequences of both institutional structures and the informal market choices of individuals has diversified understandings of global ethical responsibilities. It is argued (...) that the recasting of ethical responsibility in the increasingly sociological terms of unintended and indirect consequences of socio-material embeddedness constructs new ethical differentials and hierarchies of responsibility. These framings have facilitated new policy practices, recasting interventionist policy-making in terms of the growing self-awareness and reflexivity of Western actors, reframing ethical foreign policy as starting with the choices of individual citizens, and, at the same time, operating to reify the relations of the market. (shrink)

In a recent review article, Jeff Popke (2006, p. 510) calls for a ‘more direct engagement with theories of ethics and responsibility’ on the part of human geographers, and for a reinscription of the social as a site of ethics and responsibility. This requires that we also continue to develop ways of thinking through our responsibilities toward unseen others—both unseen neighbours and distant others—and to cultivate a renewed sense of social interconnectedness. Popke suggests that a feminist-inspired ethic of care might (...) be instrumental in developing this expanded, relational and collective vision of the social, which is particularly prescient given the contemporary economic downturn throughout the globe. Thus, as the ‘moral turn’ in geography continues to evolve, this special issue seeks to bring together geographers working within feminist or feminist-inspired frameworks, and with a shared interest in the changing geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. The collection of papers has its origins in conference sessions on Care-full Geographies, organised by the Guest Editors at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in 2007. In this editorial we seek to position the papers within broader debates about care, responsibility and ethics that have emerged in geography and the wider social sciences in recent years, and to highlight the key issues that have framed these debates. (shrink)

Despite the burgeoning literature on the governance and impact of cross-sector partnerships in the past two decades, the debate on how and when these collaborative arrangements address globally relevant problems and contribute to systemic change remains open. Building upon the notion of wicked problems and the literature on governing such wicked problems, this paper defines harnessing problems in multi-stakeholder partnerships as the approach of taking into account the nature of the problem and of organizing governance processes accordingly. The paper develops (...) an innovative analytical framework that conceptualizes MSPs in terms of three governance processes harnessing three key dimensions of wicked problems. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil provides an illustrative case study on how this analytical framework describes and explains organizational change in partnerships from a problem-based perspective. The framework can be used to better understand and predict the complex relationships between MSP governance processes, systemic change and societal problems, but also as a guiding tool in organizing governance processes to continuously re-assess the problems over time and address them accordingly. (shrink)