Research interests:
economic
geography: regional cultural economy; socio-economic geographies of
gender; work-life balance and holistic economic competitiveness; labour
organising and worker empowerment in the New Economy. Current and recent research projects
Connecting Work-Life (Im)Balance to Learning and Innovation in Dynamic Regional Economies:
research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Award
Number: RES000221574; £17 594 April 2006 - September 2008);
affilitiated to the ESRC's Gender Equality Network (GeNet)
Empowering Workers in the New Economy: Labour Market Intermediaries in the Call Centre Industry (India and the UK):
research funded by the Nuffield Foundation (Social Science Small
Research Grant: SGS 32848; £11 413 July 2006 - March 2008; awarded to
Al James and Bhaskar Vira).
Additional funding provided by the Isaac Newton Trust (£4000) and Smuts
Memorial Fund (£1090), both in the University of Cambridge.
Demystifying the Sociocultural Economy of Innovative Regional Industrial Systems: PhD research funded by the ESRC: (Award Number: R00429934224; October 1999 - September 2002)
Publications - James, A. (2008). Gendered geographies of high tech regional economies. Geography Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00086.x
- James, A.
(2007) Review of Conway, D. and Heynen, N. (eds.) ‘Globalization's
Contradictions: Geographies of Discipline, Destruction and
Transformation’. Cultural Geography (in press).
- James, A. Review of Coe, N.M., Kelly, P.F. and Yeung, H.W.C. (eds.) ‘Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction’. For Journal of Economic Geography (December 2007).
- James, A. Work-life conflict, innovation and learning: everyday experiences of working parents in Dublin. For Gender, Place and Culture, special issue on ‘Women, Work-Life Balance and Quality of Life’ (January 2008).
- James, A., Martin, R.L. and Sunley, P., 2007. The Rise of Cultural Economic Geography. In Ron Martin and Peter Sunley edited volume, Critical Concepts in Economic Geography: Volume IV, The Cultural Economy, Routledge, London, pp. 3–18.
- James, A., 2007. Demystifying the Role of Culture in Innovative Regional Economies. Forthcoming in Martin, R.L. and Sunley, P. (eds.), Critical Concepts in Economic Geography: Volume IV, The Cultural Economy, Routledge, London.
- James, A., 2008 (forthcoming). Economic Geography: Professional Services. In Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N.J. (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Elsevier.
- Gray, M. and James, A., 2007. Connecting Gender and Economic Competitiveness: Lessons from Cambridge's High Tech Regional Economy. Environment and Planning A 39 (2): 417-436.
- James, A., 2007. Everyday Effects, Practices and Causal Mechanisms of ‘Cultural Embeddedness’: Learning from Utah's High Tech Regional Economy. Geoforum 38: 393-413.
- James, A., 2006. Review of Grabher, H. and Powell, W.W (eds.) Networks: Volumes I and II (Critical Studies in Economic Institutions 6). Economic Geography 82(2): 233-5
- Gray, M. and James, A., 2006. Theorising the Gendered Socio-Institutional Bases of Dynamic Regional Economies. In Polenske, K. (ed.), The Economic Geography of Innovation, Cambridge University Press: pp. 129-156.
- James, A., 2006. Critical Moments in the Production of ‘Rigorous’ and ‘Relevant’ Cultural Economic Geographies. Progress in Human Geography 30(3): 1-20.
- James, A., 2006. On the Spatial Limits of Culture in High Tech Regional Economic Development. Chapter 8 Radcliffe, S. (ed.), Culture and Development in a Globalising World: Geographies, Actors and Paradigms, Routledge, London, pp. 176-202.
- James, A., 2005. Demystifying the Role of Culture in Innovative Regional Economies, Regional Studies 39(9): 1197-1216.
- James, A., Gray, M., Martin, R.L. and Plummer, P., 2004. (Expanding) the Role of Geography in Public Policy, Environment and Planning A 36 (11): 1901-1905.
- James, A.,
2003. Regional Culture, Corporate Strategy and High Tech Innovation:
Salt Lake City. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Geography and
Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. Available online here.
Work in progress: - James, A. and Vira, B. (in review). Alternative labour organising in India's call centres. Submitted to Economic Geography (July 2007).
- James, A. and Vira, B. Labour mobility geographies and their intermediation in India's ITES/BPO industry. For submission to Journal of Economic Geography (September 2007)
Recent seminars and presentations
Invisible
career staircases in India’s New E-Service Economy (with Bhaskar Vira).
Paper presented to the London Economic Geography Seminar, London 12 May
2008.
The operation and outcomes of labour market intermediaries
in India’s E-services sector (Bhaskar Vira and Al James). Paper
presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association of American
Geographers 2008, Boston 15-19 April, 2008. Working in the New
Economy: The Labour Process in India’s Call Centre Industry (Bhaskar
Vira and Al James). Invited seminar to the Department of International
Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, ‘Contemporary
South Asia’ seminar series, 18 October 2007. Work-life conflict,
innovation and learning: everyday experiences of working parents in
Dublin and Cambridge’s IT clusters. Paper presented to the Annual
Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of
British Geographers 2007 (‘Women, Work-Life Balance and Quality of
Life’ session), RGS, London 28-31 August 2007. Labour Mobility
Geographies and their Intermediation in India’s Call Centre Sector
(joint paper with Bhaskar Vira). Paper presented to the Second Global
Economic Geography Conference, Beijing, China, 25-28 June 2007. Repositioning
the ‘Business Case’ for Work-Life Balance Geographically: Everyday
Worker Experiences in Dublin’s High Tech Cluster. Paper presented to
the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers 2007
(‘Everyday Geographies of Work-Life (Im)balance’ session organised by
Al James), San Francisco 17-21 April, 2007.
Alternative Labour
Organising in India’s BPO / ITES Sector (joint paper with Bhaskar
Vira). Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association of
American Geographers 2007, San Francisco 17-21 April, 2007.
Alternative
Labour Organising in India’s Call centres (joint paper with Bhaskar
Vira). Invited seminar to the Department of Geography, University of
Manchester March 2007.
Teaching
GEG171X: The Geography of Modern Britain
GEG258: Spaces of Uneven Development
GEG320: Geographies of Labour
GEGM030: Thinking Geographically
GEGM038: Globalisation and Development in Practice
Research students
Laurent Frideres (with Professor Ron Martin). ‘The spatial and temporal dynamics of industrial specialization and clustering in the regional economy’.
Hsiu-man Chen (with Adrian Smith) ‘Corporate codes of conduct and labour organising in global garment commodity chains’
Supriti
Bezbaruah (with Cathy McIlwaine) ‘The evolving relationship of work,
women and the State in India: the experience of the banking sector’
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Dr Al James