Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to clarify the nature and perspective of labor geography by investigating the related discourses in Anglophone economic geography.
The origin of labor geography is traced to some works written by radical economic geographers in 1970s, and its disciplinary characteristics were established in 1990s. Labor geographers criticize the capital-centered standpoint of mainstream economic geographers (both the radicals and the neoclassicals). Then, they try to make a sub-discipline of economic geography through the eyes of labor. They recognize that labor has the agency to participate in the making of the capitalist economic landscape. Flexible arrangement of labor force by employers turns to “risk” from the employees' point of view. Labor geographers claim that the concept of employability, which usually means the components of a worker's value in labor market, should be understood as spatially and temporarily contingent one that cannot attribute its components to only individual factors. If employability is redefined as a contingent concept that contains various circumstantial factors, validity of workfare social policy that regards workers' skill shortage as the cause of unemployment and urges the unemployed to participate in labor market in order to shrink welfare and social security expenditure, should be questioned.
For labor geographers, labor market is not orthodox commodity market governed only by price mechanism, but segmented and socially regulated arena for various social actors. Labor market is intrinsically constituted locally as a consequence of triad of causal processes associated with production, reproduction and social regulation. Localization of employment policy underpinned by workfarism puts importance on local scale as a unit of social regulation, however, different spatial scales emerge as a consequence of the interaction of social actors in labor market. Labor geographers investigate how the specific spatial scale is produced and how it is articulated with both upper and lower spatial scale.
