The Impact of Economic Change (Submitted Papers)Author(s): Michael BradfordSource: Area, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), pp. 218-219Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003124 .

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218 IBG Annual Conference

While research on the influence of the Japanese on the world scene has begun to attract the interest it deserves, there is still surprisingly little published in English on the economic geography of Japan itself. Three of the papers presented, however, began to explore this question. John Connell (Sydney) looked at cultural and economic aspects of the issue of immi grant work in Japan. Despite mounting pressure from several labour-exporting countries in the Asian region, it seems unlikely that Japan will relax its highly-restrictive immigration policies. An analysis of the distribution of manufacturing employment in Japan by Graham Humphrys (Swansea) identified a marked regional division into inner, middle and outer Japan. This paper demonstrated that Japan's changing industrial structure and the locational concentration of declining industries was creating regional development problems, most notably for outer Japan. David Pinder (Plymouth Polytechnic) contrasted the development paths of the Japanese and European oil industries, citing government policies and the legacies of historical investment decisions as two of the key factors in this divergent development.

Graham Humphrys University of Swansea

Jamie Peck University of Manchester

The impact of economic change (submitted papers) This set of five submitted papers shared some common themes such as flexibility, small firms, the role of local and national regulation, and development. The first two concentrated on the regional scale while the others analysed developments in cities.

The paper on ' Business networks, flexibility and regional development in UK business services' presented by John Bryson and David Keeble (University of Cambridge) and Peter

Wood (University College, London) analysed the activity of two sets of new small companies of less than 25 employees: management consultancies and market research. They argued, in con trast to previous literature, that the very small companies that they had interviewed made great use of networks, which they classified into three types: client-based, supplier-based and support functions. One of the effects of these networks was to enable many market research companies to offer a full service by subcontracting. Even in the recession these small companies were an area of growth and were forming a dynamic component of economic growth at the local, regional and national scales.

Graham Humphrys (University College of Swansea) and Adrian Seaborne (University of Regina) in their paper on 'Persistent unemployment and industrial change in industrial South Wales' concentrated on describing the areas of relatively high unemployment that despite changes in both economic development policies and major economic changes within the region. The paper raised questions about the nature of persistence in terms of long term structural change and cyclical sensitivity, and the degree to which male and female unemployment were unconnected.

Rob Imrie (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London) and Hugh Thomas (School of Planning, Oxford Polytechnic) again considered small firms in their paper on Cardiff, 'Urban regeneration and local economic development: the distributive costs of urban policy '. After tracing the shifts in policy during the 1980s and the different types of areas that had been regenerated, they concluded that for some small firms there had been heavy costs that had not been recognised by the agencies that were promoting the new image of Cardiff. They also commented on the disorganised nature of the delivery of urban policy that had hindered local economic development.

Chris Maher (Monash University, Australia) argued that to understand the 'Residential property markets in the late 1980s: price and affordability issues in Australian cities 'both global (economic restructuring) and local (demographic) processes should be examined. He highlighted the cyclical sensitivity in the house price changes of Sydney among Australian cities and inner

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IBG Annual Conference 219

areas at the intra-metropolitan scale. He argued that Sydney's position as an international city and the link of the inner areas with first the deregulation of finance and then the fall-out during the recession made them more prone to the booms and slumps associated with speculation.

Glen Norcliffe (University of York, Canada) in a well illustrated talk on ' From Fordism to flexible production in the technopole of Gerland, Lyon ' showed how an old industrial quarter in Lyon, a functionally integrated area bassed on a major abattoir, had been transformed into a technopole with a scientific university and research institutions concentrating on biotechnology,

which had attracted several technologically-intensive activities requiring flexible production methods. He argued that regulation had been very important during both regimes of accumu lation, with for example the city council controlling land use and during the new era ensuring that new firms could not speculate in real estate.

Michael Bradford University of Manchester

History, identity and Celtic nationalism This session, convened by Pyrs Gruffudd (University College, Swansea), demonstrated the strengths of having a session with a strong central theme around which various arguments could be woven by the speakers, discussants and audience.

In the first module, 'Landscape and Identity', Charles Withers (Cheltenham & Gloucester College) discussed ' The contribution of Highlandism to Scottish National Identity ' to show the ways in which conceptions of an economically marginal, but symbolically central, natural region of Scotland had been worked and reworked through a variety of cultural codes to provide a dominant reading of Scotland and the Scotsman. Significantly, this' culturing ' of the Highlands was in large part undertaken from south of the border. Thus the images of the kilted highlander as both drunken fool and invincible warrior served, although not without contradictions, the assimiliation of Scottishness into the hegemonic project of the construction of a 'British' identity united in its differences. This, as the discussant (Mike Heffernan, Loughborough

University) pointed out, knitted Withers' insights with those of one of the study group guests, historian Prys Morgan (University College, Swansea). Morgan's paper on' Mountain shame and mountain glory and Welsh identity in the 18th and 19th centuries ' described the transformation of the meaning of the Welsh mountains for the Welsh from being the ' fag-ends ' of creation in the theological landscape description of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to their central place in the symbolism and iconography of a popular Welsh identity by 1850. He argued that this transformation was a process by which the Welsh people were taught by the English, or at least particular fractions of them with particular ideological projects, to appreciate and understand their mountains in quite specific ways.

The second module, 'History and Modernity ', for which Gillian Rose (QMW, London) acted as discussant, brought the analyses of identity into the twentieth century. Pyrs Gruffudd, in a paper entitled 'Back to the Land: environment and nationalism in inter-war Wales ', explained how Welsh nationalist politics in the 1920s and 1930s had been informed by a

modernist discourse on rurality, much of it constructed within the' Aberystwyth School 'which had formed around geographers such as H J Fleure (whose appearance, as icon, was greeted with a ripple of applause!). This attempt to fuse tradition (the' Welsh peasant ') and modernity (high technology) sought the construction of a basis for Welsh political independence along the lines of other European political movements of both right and left. The uses of a heavily gendered iconography in the construction of national identity, evident in inter-war Wales, were decon structed for early twentieth-century Ireland in a paper by Catherine Nash (Nottingham

University). Under the title 'Landscape, History and " the nation " in Irish identity' she discussed the notions of ' the Land ' (grounded in the West of Ireland) and ' the Nation ' as they intersect in the depiction of women. She demonstrated how early twentieth-century painters had attempted to anchor their systems of meanings in the figure of the peasant woman of Western Ireland. The contradictions inherent in this project were brought out in discussions of the

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