Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

The Dictionary of Human Geography (104 page)

inheritance systems
In theory, inheritance is the transmission of exclusive rights in prop erty at death. Such transmission is part of the wider devolution of rights between holders and heirs, and usually between generations. This process of devolution can also involve transfers between the living for education, marriage and property purchase, as well as transfer of any residual at the holder?s death. In societies where production is based on the HouseHoLd and where property rights are vested in the domestic group, the evolution of such rights is of vital importance. In simple hoe agricultural societies, such as found over much of sub Saharan Africa, inheritance be tween spouses is rare, with transfers tending to be from males to males or from females to females. In such settings, economic differenti ation is limited and access to land relatively easy, with inheritance occurring within unili neal descent groups such as clans or lineage. In plough based agrarian systems, a diverging or bisexual form of devolution is more com mon, and frequently involves children inherit ing from both parents and parents transferring property to both daughters and sons and not necessarily at death. One such form of pre mortem inheritance is dowry given to daughters at their marriage, which has been widespread in Eurasia. At marriage, some kind of conjugal fund is created and the property transmitted, although not in equal proportions, to the children. The different treatment of siblings depending on birth order takes the form of primogeniture (impartibility), multigeniture (partibility) or ultimogeniture (Borough English). Systems of impartible inheritance in which the eldest son was sole heir were common among elite groups in europe, where title and pos ition were linked to estate and income. Younger sons might seek their fortune through careers in the church or the army, to which (NEW PARAGRAPH) they had access as a result of the political power embodied in the parental estate. In European peasantries (see peasant), the par ents might hand over the farm to a son or a daughter on the occasion of his or her mar riage, reserving for themselves right to bed and board, although frequently giving rise to extended or stem family households. Such arrangements might create familial tensions, since an early transfer might weaken the au thority of the elderly, and a delayed transfer might create hostility towards the elderly among the young. In capitaList societies, where the majority of the population has no ownership of the means of production, inher itance is of far less significance. However, the ability to transfer privilege as well as residen tial property is intrinsic to family life in all economic systems. Most modern societies place a progressive tax on inherited property, which could be viewed as a means of equaliz ing advantage. Ways of avoiding tax on per sonal assets at death are found in the use of trusts, life estates and charitable giving. In the USA, where charitable gifts are tax exempt, private foundations gain enormous benefits, and in the UK major contributions to national collections of art, buildings or land result from attempts to avoid death duties (Shoup, 1966). rms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Goody (1962, 1978); Goody, Thirsk and (NEW PARAGRAPH) Thompson (1976); Shoup (1966); Smith (1984). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
inner city
That region of the metropolitan area consisting primarily of older residential areas in close proximity to the downtown core. By the late nineteenth century, inner city neigh bourhoods were mainly blue collar districts, providing shelter for the families of working men employed in the wholesaling, manufactur ing and transportation sectors that were located in the ring of industrial uses adjacent to port and railway terminals outside the centraL Business district. In the industrial city, then, the inner city was the home of the working poor, including immigrants, as famously described by the cHicago scHooL between 1910 and 1970 (Wirth, 1928; Suttles, 1968). In such cities, minimal land use regulation introduced serious traffic congestion and severe air, land and water pollution, encouraging the withdrawal of the middle class to tram/streetcar and commuter suburbs. Separation bred a suspicion and even fear of the inner city by the middle class, a condition that survives in some nations to the present. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Consequently, a definition of the inner city cannot be limited to location and age of hous ing alone (see housing studies). In the past 150 years or more, the inner city has experi enced a spoiled identity. The grotesque nineteenth century imagery of Dickensian London, Engels? poignant depictions of life in industrial Manchester, the later portrayals of Inner London by the Booths (Charles and William) and of Inner Montreal by Herbert Ames, and the photo documentary essays of Jacob Riis in New York all consolidated a highly stigmatized image of both need and menace. In many respects, the social sciences were born into the problem of the inner city, with William Booth, the Pittsburgh Survey and the Chicago School all concerned with the mapping of various personal and social pathologies in inner city districts. Not surprisingly, the influ ential verdict of the Chicago School was that the inner city was the natural habitat of indi vidual and social disorganization. Such a judgement led easily to a view that demolition and rebuilding would effect social as well as urban renewal, and the nascent welfare state engaged in widespread clearance in older inner districts, beginning in the 1930s. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the aftermath of deindustriaLization, the inner city remains a site of social problems: Margaret Thatcher?s infamous, deprecating allusion to ?those inner cities? in 1987 (Rob son, 1988) revealed not only an abiding social construct but also a social reality in many declining industrial centres. Indeed, in the same year as Mrs Thatcher?s declaration, William Julius Wilson (1987) published his celebrated text on concentrated and racialized urban poverty in American inner cities. His undercLass thesis, drawing attention both to macro economic employment trends as well as a culture of poverty in the inner city, estab lished an urban research agenda. In Western Europe, an explosive literature emerged in the 1990s on multidimensional social exclusion, targeted on (but not limited to) inner city dis tricts, some of it importing American under class language (Mingione, 1996; Madanipour, Cars and Allen, 1998). Addressing social ex clusion and deprivation in the inner city and priming urban regeneration have become sig nificant policy directions in many European states. (NEW PARAGRAPH) However, the fusion of pLace and identity that sees only social problems in the inner city is too rigid. For one thing, as the French ?ban lieu? riots of 2005 revealed so clearly, depriv ation and exclusion may be even sharper in suburban sites (see suburb). Second, the (NEW PARAGRAPH) view of the inner city as a problem is an over simplified fabrication (Ley, 2000). Just as the Chicago School displayed a patronizing sub urban perspective on the inner city, so middle class policy makers and politicians through the urban renewal era and later have sustained the same stereotype. In her famous polemic against urban renewal, Jane Jacobs (1992 [1961]) contrasted the detached view of the urban bureaucrat with the view at ground level of urban residents in medium density older neighbourhoods, extolling an insider?s per spective of local vitality, diversity and self help. Her 1961 message was prophetic and in the next decade the beginnings of gentrifica tion indicated an equally sympathetic view of the inner city by young urban professionals. In post industrial cities such as London, New York, Toronto or Sydney, gentrification has led to a massive middle class make over of many inner city districts (Hamnett, 2003), sometimes as an objective of regeneration pol icies (Cameron, 2003). Frequently, gentrifica tion has diffused outwards from the real estate anchor of existing upper middle class districts, whose longevity over several generations also reinforces a more accurate view of inner city diversity rather than homogeneity. dl (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ley (2000); Wilson (1987). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
innovation
The introduction of a new phe nomenon or the phenomenon itself (which may include concepts and objects, practices and systems, variously combined in products, and processes). In human geography an early stream of work focused on the origin and spread of innovations, particularly in cul tural geography, and it was the study of innovations that provided the mainspring for Torsten Hagerstrand?s development of the for mal study of innovation diffusion in spatial science (itself an example of an intellectual innovation that combined new concepts such as the mean information fieLd, new objects such as the computer that enabled Hagerstrand to construct his model, and new practices such as the algorithms that powered his Monte Carlo simulations: see Hagerstrand, 1967). A more recent stream of work in economic geography has focused on the research and development processes in which commercial innovations are embedded, on spillover effects (see dusters) and on the spatial variations in productivity that may result from differential geographies of inn ovation (Feldmann, 2000). Taken together, (NEW PARAGRAPH) these generate such complex outcomes over space that Morgan (2004) proposed a focus on territorial innovation systems sensitive to the multiple scales at which effects are registered, though most research continues to focus on the region (Asheim and Gertler, 2005; see also learning regions). dg (NEW PARAGRAPH)
input-output
An analytical framework developed by economist Wassily Leontieff to describe and model the inter industry linkages within the economy, and to use this informa tion to examine economic and policy impacts. It traces how the outputs of one sector become the inputs for others: thus the machine tools industry uses energy, steel and other inputs, and its outputs are in turn inputs to car and aircraft industries. The model requires exten sive data and estimates from surveys, and the input output table can then be manipulated to calculate multipliers and so model the impact of policy changes. These models were originally calculated at the national scale, but have been extended to regional and multi regional models. lwh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Miller and Blair (1985). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
institutional economics
Institutionalist thought has come to the fore in economic geography since the 1990s, following its re vival in economic theory during the late 1980s around two very different strands. The first is new institutional economics, most closely associ ated with the work of Oliver Williamson on the theory of the firm and others such as Mancur Olson and Douglass North on the role of (public) institutions in economic regulation and evolution. In this work, the focus falls on how firms, networks and institutions arise as organizing mechanisms in the market econ omy, complement market transactions and generally provide stability, steer and judgment in an otherwise multi interest and multi directional economic space composed of competing individuals. The economy is concep tualized as a constellation of firms, markets and institutions, each working to a different logic and with specialist properties. New institutional economics does not break with mainstream economics, since it shares its core assumptions relating to individual motivation (e.g. maxi mization, hedonism, rational choice) and mar ket behaviour (e.g. price as a core allocation mechanism, informational transparency). (NEW PARAGRAPH) New institutional economics has had lim ited impact in economic geography, having (NEW PARAGRAPH) lost momentum after an initial flurry of inter est sparked by extensions of Williamson?s transaction cost model to explain agglomer ation. For example, Scott?s (1988c) work on high technology and other types of industrial agglomeration added an important spatial di mension to Williamson?s model by showing how proximity in conditions of specialization and inter firm linkage served to reduce trans action costs and transactional uncertainty. More recently, there has been a slight revival, through the work of some economic geograph ers engaging with the work of Paul Krugman to explain inter regional disparities on the basis of trade differentials and national or regional institutional settings. (NEW PARAGRAPH) One reason why new institutional econom ics has faltered in economic geography is due to the historical dominance within the sub discipline of heterodox economic traditions critical of the methodological individualism, rationalism, formalism and a historicity of mainstream economics. The second strand of institutional economics old institutionalism fits more easily into an influential lineage that includes classical political economy accounts in the 1950s and 1960s of urban and regional growth and inequality (e.g. Nicholas Kaldor, Albert O. Hirschman and Francois Perroux on cumulative causation); Marxist explanations during the 1970s of uneven development and unequal exchange, based on the imperatives of capitalist accumulation and the consequences of class/gender/race exploitation and struggle; and regulation theory explanations in the 1980s of long term economic stability, struc tural crisis and renewal, and capitalist variety in terms of the match or mismatch between historical regimes of accumulation and regulation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Old institutional economics, named so in rec ognition of influence of US pioneers such as Thorstein Veblen, Wesley Mitchell, John Commons, Clarence Ayres, John Dewey, and later Karl Polanyi and John Galbraith, envis ages the economy itself as an instituted process in all its manifestations. Thus, macroeco nomic rules and institutions, markets and market practices, prices and values, produc tion conventions and exchange norms, finan cial rules and economic rationalities, and corporate and regional or national standards are all conceptualized as socially instituted ar rangements guiding individual action. Institu tions, however defined, are not seen as a particular form of organization and distant from markets, in the way that new institutional economics does, but as the very life and substance of the economy. Institutional parameters, as Hodgson (1988) argues in his celebrated book, explain economic variety, economic impulse and organization, evolu tionary change, historical specificity and rules of meaning, interpretation and action. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term ?institution? covers a wide variety of meaning to progressively thicken the idea of the economy as an institution. Most obviously, this includes the formal institutions of eco nomic and regulation such as firms, banks, corporate rules, business standards and gov ernment regulations that are societally specific, slow to change and significant chan nelling devices. It also includes informal insti tutions such as social conventions of power, deference, respect, trust and legitimacy, which are also highly localized, and which guide be haviour in different markets, organizations and territories. In turn, taken for granted eco nomic canons such as profit maximization, market individualism, price signalling and actor rationality are read as value laden in a dual sense: first, as embedded fictions that need to be worked at; and, second, as socially generated norms that are neither incontrovert ible nor universal. Then, economic continuity and change are explained in terms of recursive routines and habits personal, interpersonal, organizational and social treated as the hid den hand of daily economic practice and consensus, as the social genes of economic evolution and path dependency, and as a core determinant of learning and innovation capability. Old institutional economics, thus, rejects the premises of mainstream economics, but it also injects a considerable degree of texture, contingency and socio institutional specificity in heterodox economic theory traditionally dominated by big picture gener alizations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In economic geography, this variant of insti tutional economics has had some impact in development geography by soliciting critical work on the role of international organizations such as the World Bank or major NGOs; research on the social and institutional param eters of particular markets, such as micro credit or open air trade; and studies of local economic potential based on an analysis of formal and informal institutions, social con ventions and learning processes. The concep tual thrust, however, has come from studies of urban and regional economic dynamism and creativity in the global North. Many new con cepts, such as cluster dynamics, industrial atmosphere, institutional thickness, untraded interdependencies, associational ties, indus trial slack and redundancy, urban buzz and creativity, trust and reciprocity, and intelligent regionalism, have been inspired by institu tional economics to account for local eco nomic success. Researchers associated with institutionalism in this field include Annelee Saxenian, Amy Glasmeier, Michael Storper, Allen Scott, Meric Gertler, Trevor Barnes, Chris Olds, Phil Cooke, Kevin Morgan, Ron Martin, Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift, Jamie Peck, Ray Hudson, Peter Maskell, Anders Malmberg, Bjorn Asheim, Gernot Grabher, Peter Sunley and Harald Bartheld. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The work of these researchers has brought new insight into the spatial dynamics of the economy in three broad areas. The first relates to the role of spatial proximity between firms such that the full benefits of specialization, agglomeration, and trust and reciprocity can be exploited. The second relates to the differ ent ways in which social capital developed in civic associations, institutional activism and reflexivity, and public sector leadership can contribute to local economic vitality. The third relates to the spatial foundations of the knowledge economy and economic learning in general, where the research has highlighted the significance of localized R&D, technology transfer, learning in inter firm networks, tacit knowledge formed in interpersonal networks of common purpose and mutual obligation. This body of work has considerably expanded understanding of how space affects the institutions of economic development and change. aa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Amin and Thrift (1994a); Hudson (2005); Martin and Sunley (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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