The ‘global’ economic downturn and subsequent phase of austerity have prompted an ongoing search ... more The ‘global’ economic downturn and subsequent phase of austerity have prompted an ongoing search for ‘alternative’, more sustainable models of resilient and redistributive growth. Yet the geographical scope of that search – commonly centred on Anglo-American models of best practice remains limited in the face of a ‘cosmopolitan’ diversity of financial practice. This paper identifies important possibilities for advancing economic theories of resilience through new cross-disciplinary engagements with resilience research ‘by another name’ in development studies. These ideas are developed through an empirical analysis of faith-based charitable giving amongst the Somali migrant community in London, for whom Islam forms a major defining element of their identity and is difficult to disentangle from Somali culture. Our analysis challenges internalist conceptions of economic resilience vis-à-vis a diversity of translocal resilience practices of economic provisioning, resource redistribution...
The aim of this Handbook is to make the case for the necessity – conceptual, empirical and politi... more The aim of this Handbook is to make the case for the necessity – conceptual, empirical and political – to think spatially about the constitution and expressions of money and financial systems: in short to make the case for a geography of money. A key tenet of the Handbook is that taking space and place seriously is essential to understanding the constitution, operation and organization of money and financial systems, institutions, agents and markets. For economic geographers such thinking is by no means new (Harvey, 1973, 1982; Corbridge et al., 1994; Leyshon and Thrift, 1997; Martin, 1999), although the dynamics of money and finance have, for too long, appeared ‘offstage’ (Clark, 2006: 84) relative to long(er) standing concerns of production, work, technological change, competition, agglomeration and urban and regional economic development. Beyond the discipline of Geography, and notwithstanding the groundbreaking work of Viviana Zelizer (1979), however, much of the social sciences...
This paper argues that firm finance is something of a ‘black-box’ in economic geography, a largel... more This paper argues that firm finance is something of a ‘black-box’ in economic geography, a largely take-for-granted aspect of production. Focusing on small firms, the paper argues that firm finance warrants analysis, not simply to ‘add’ to knowledge and to form another sub-discipline of economic geography, but in order to further develop and refine our understanding of uneven development. The paper explores the neglect of firm finance in economic geography and highlights some of the contributions of literatures in economics and business. Finally, the paper outlines three points of intersection between these disparate, usually disciplinary-bound, literatures in business, economics, and economic geography: the place- bound nature of firms, the social character of economic relations, and third, the power relations and asymmetries inherent in financial relationships. These intersections are used to critique existing small firm finance literatures and to outline the contours of an emergi...
Developing an evolutionary perspective towards the changing anatomy of the banking sector reveals... more Developing an evolutionary perspective towards the changing anatomy of the banking sector reveals the enduring tensions and contradictions between spatial centralisation and the possibilities for decentralisation before, during and after the British banking crisis. The shift from banking boom to crisis in 2007 is conceptualised as a significant and on-going moment in the long-term evolution of the historical institutional–spatial dominance of London over other city-regions in Britain. The analysis demonstrates the importance of the institutional and geographical legacies of the British national political economy and variegation of capitalism established in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in shaping contemporary geographical outcomes. Regulatory changes combined with financial innovation in the latter years of the twentieth century to create an opportunity for English regional and Scottish banks excluded from previous institutional–spatial centralisation to expand ...
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2017
The paper contributes to literature on the geographies of corporate philanthropy through a case s... more The paper contributes to literature on the geographies of corporate philanthropy through a case study of the origins, growth and decline of the Northern Rock bank's charitable foundation. Analysis reveals the complex, geographically-embedded nature of philanthropic motivations and impacts. It demonstrates that investment in home and community by philanthropists was part of a regionally-inscribed business-model of excessive risk taking that brought them considerable personal financial rewards. It highlights tensions and conflicts between corporate philanthropists and professional grant-makers over the scale and regional focus of giving. The paper concludes that the positive outcomes of corporate philanthropy are difficult to sustain in disadvantaged regions where shifts in corporate strategy and fragilities in the local economy undermine charitable giving.
In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publi... more In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes three contributions to debates about financial exclusion. First, it provides the first exploratory spatial analysis of the personal lending data made available; it scrutinises the parameters and robustness of the dataset and evaluates the extent to which the data increase transparency in UK personal lending markets. Second, it uses the data to provide a geographical overview of patterns of personal lending across Great Britain. Third, it uses this analysis to revisit the analytical and political limitations of ‘open data’ in addressing the relationship between access to finance and economic marginalisation. Although a binary policy imaginar...
The ‘global’ economic downturn and subsequent phase of austerity have prompted an ongoing search ... more The ‘global’ economic downturn and subsequent phase of austerity have prompted an ongoing search for ‘alternative’, more sustainable models of resilient and redistributive growth. Yet the geographical scope of that search – commonly centred on Anglo-American models of best practice remains limited in the face of a ‘cosmopolitan’ diversity of financial practice. This paper identifies important possibilities for advancing economic theories of resilience through new cross-disciplinary engagements with resilience research ‘by another name’ in development studies. These ideas are developed through an empirical analysis of faith-based charitable giving amongst the Somali migrant community in London, for whom Islam forms a major defining element of their identity and is difficult to disentangle from Somali culture. Our analysis challenges internalist conceptions of economic resilience vis-à-vis a diversity of translocal resilience practices of economic provisioning, resource redistribution...
The aim of this Handbook is to make the case for the necessity – conceptual, empirical and politi... more The aim of this Handbook is to make the case for the necessity – conceptual, empirical and political – to think spatially about the constitution and expressions of money and financial systems: in short to make the case for a geography of money. A key tenet of the Handbook is that taking space and place seriously is essential to understanding the constitution, operation and organization of money and financial systems, institutions, agents and markets. For economic geographers such thinking is by no means new (Harvey, 1973, 1982; Corbridge et al., 1994; Leyshon and Thrift, 1997; Martin, 1999), although the dynamics of money and finance have, for too long, appeared ‘offstage’ (Clark, 2006: 84) relative to long(er) standing concerns of production, work, technological change, competition, agglomeration and urban and regional economic development. Beyond the discipline of Geography, and notwithstanding the groundbreaking work of Viviana Zelizer (1979), however, much of the social sciences...
This paper argues that firm finance is something of a ‘black-box’ in economic geography, a largel... more This paper argues that firm finance is something of a ‘black-box’ in economic geography, a largely take-for-granted aspect of production. Focusing on small firms, the paper argues that firm finance warrants analysis, not simply to ‘add’ to knowledge and to form another sub-discipline of economic geography, but in order to further develop and refine our understanding of uneven development. The paper explores the neglect of firm finance in economic geography and highlights some of the contributions of literatures in economics and business. Finally, the paper outlines three points of intersection between these disparate, usually disciplinary-bound, literatures in business, economics, and economic geography: the place- bound nature of firms, the social character of economic relations, and third, the power relations and asymmetries inherent in financial relationships. These intersections are used to critique existing small firm finance literatures and to outline the contours of an emergi...
Developing an evolutionary perspective towards the changing anatomy of the banking sector reveals... more Developing an evolutionary perspective towards the changing anatomy of the banking sector reveals the enduring tensions and contradictions between spatial centralisation and the possibilities for decentralisation before, during and after the British banking crisis. The shift from banking boom to crisis in 2007 is conceptualised as a significant and on-going moment in the long-term evolution of the historical institutional–spatial dominance of London over other city-regions in Britain. The analysis demonstrates the importance of the institutional and geographical legacies of the British national political economy and variegation of capitalism established in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in shaping contemporary geographical outcomes. Regulatory changes combined with financial innovation in the latter years of the twentieth century to create an opportunity for English regional and Scottish banks excluded from previous institutional–spatial centralisation to expand ...
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2017
The paper contributes to literature on the geographies of corporate philanthropy through a case s... more The paper contributes to literature on the geographies of corporate philanthropy through a case study of the origins, growth and decline of the Northern Rock bank's charitable foundation. Analysis reveals the complex, geographically-embedded nature of philanthropic motivations and impacts. It demonstrates that investment in home and community by philanthropists was part of a regionally-inscribed business-model of excessive risk taking that brought them considerable personal financial rewards. It highlights tensions and conflicts between corporate philanthropists and professional grant-makers over the scale and regional focus of giving. The paper concludes that the positive outcomes of corporate philanthropy are difficult to sustain in disadvantaged regions where shifts in corporate strategy and fragilities in the local economy undermine charitable giving.
In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publi... more In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes three contributions to debates about financial exclusion. First, it provides the first exploratory spatial analysis of the personal lending data made available; it scrutinises the parameters and robustness of the dataset and evaluates the extent to which the data increase transparency in UK personal lending markets. Second, it uses the data to provide a geographical overview of patterns of personal lending across Great Britain. Third, it uses this analysis to revisit the analytical and political limitations of ‘open data’ in addressing the relationship between access to finance and economic marginalisation. Although a binary policy imaginar...
In 2013 the UK Government announced that seven of the nation's largest banks had agreed to publis... more In 2013 the UK Government announced that seven of the nation's largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes three contributions to debates about financial exclusion. First, it provides the first exploratory spatial analysis of the personal lending data made available; it scrutinises the parameters and robustness of the dataset and evaluates the extent to which the data increases transparency in UK personal lending markets. Second, it uses the data to provide a geographical overview of patterns of personal lending across Great Britain. Third, it uses this analysis to revisit the analytical and political limitations of 'open data' in addressing the relationship between access to finance and economic marginalisation. Although a binary policy imaginary of 'inclusion-exclusion' has historically driven advocacy for data disclosure, recent literatures on financial exclusion generate the need for more complex and variegated understandings of economic marginalisation. The paper questions the relationship between transparency and data disclosure, the policy push for financial inclusion, and patterns of indebtedness and economic marginalisation in a world where 'fringe finance' has become mainstream. Drawing on these literatures, this analysis suggests that data disclosure, and the transparency it affords, is a necessary but not sufficient tool in understanding the distributional implications of variegated access to credit.
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Papers by Jane Pollard