Prologue: Setting the Scene

Aims and Objectives

Defining Production and the Specificities of Capitalist Production

Five Basic Questions about Capitalist Production

Some Questions of Epistemology, Theory, and Method: Making the Case for a Marxian Point of Departure in Analyzing Production and Its Geographies

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Placing Production in Its Theoretical Contexts

Introduction

Setting the Scene: Conceptualizing the Production Process within Capitalism via Some Basic Concepts from Marxian Political Economy

Varieties of Marxism and the Engagement between Economic Geography and Marxian Political Economy

Further Refining the Conception of Production as a Social Process

Concluding Comments: A Framework for Understanding Production and the Structure of the Remainder of This Volume

Notes

Capitalist Production, Societal Reproduction, and Capitalist States

Introduction

From a Theory of the Capitalist State and Toward a Theory of National States: Why Does the State Take the Form That It Does?

National States, Economies, and Civil Societies

National States and Social Regulation

Crisis Tendencies, National State Regulation, and the Limits to Regulationist Approaches

``Hollowing Out'' and ``Reorganization'' of National States: From National State Regulation to More Complex Geographies of Regulation and Processes of Governance

What Do National States Do to Ensure That Production Is Possible?

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Recruiting Workers, Organizing Work

Introduction

Regulating Relationships between Capital and Labor: Collective Representation of the Interests of Capital and Labor ``for Themselves''

Competition in the Labor Market: Recruitment, Retention, and Resistance

Organizing Work and the Labor Process

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Company Connections: Competition and Cooperation, Part 1

Introduction

Competition within Existing Socio-Organizational and Technical Paradigms

Competition via Creating New Technical and Organizational Paradigms of Production and New Products

Competition via Market Creation and Marketing Innovation

Market Structures, Competition, and the Processes of Globalization

Competition via Learning and the Creation and Monopolization of Knowledge

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Company Connections: Competition and Cooperation, Part 2

Introduction

Make, Buy, or Network? Collaboration or Competition via the Market as Supply Strategies

Boundaries of Firms and Networks: Closed and Bounded or Open and Discontinuous Spaces?

Longer-Term Strategic Collaboration: Strategic Alliances and Joint Ventures

Acquisitions and Mergers as Competitive Strategies

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Divisions of Labor: Cleavage Planes and Axes of Cooperation

Introduction

Organizing Workers, Dividing Workers: Trade Unions and the Institutions of Organized Labor

Unity and Division between Groups of Workers: Dimensions of Simultaneous Unity and Division

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Production, Place and Space

Introduction: Place and Space

Conceptualizing Places within the Spaces and Structures of Capitalism

Producing Identities and Senses of and Attachments to Places

Defending and (Re-)Presenting Places

Reconciling the Tensions of Meaningful Place versus Profitable Space: State Policies, Social Cohesion, and Spatial Integration

Varieties of Capitalist State Spatial Policies

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Materials Transformations: Production and Nature

Introduction

Production as a Process of Materials Transformation: Thermodynamics, the Laws of Conservation, and the Natural Limits to Production

Production as a Process of Materials Transformation: The Materials Balance Principle, Industrial Metabolism, and the Social Limits to Thinking about Production in This Way

Capitalist Relations of Production and the Production of Nature

Capitalist Production as a Process of Deliberate Environmental Transformation

Capitalist Production as a Process of Unintended Environmental Transformation and Pollution

Sustainable Capitalist Production: But in What Sense Sustainable?

Is Sustainable Production Possible within the Structural Limits Defined By Capitalist Social Relations?

Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Postscript

Introduction

What Sort of Capitalist Economy, What Sort of Geographies?

Challenges for the Future

The Final Frontier?

Note

References

Index

About the Author