The Dictionary of Human Geography (66 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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factorial ecology
The application of either factor anaLysis or principaL components anaLysis to matrices of socio economic and other data for areal units. Generally used inductively (cf. induction), most factorial ecologies have been applied to data for small areas within cities (cf. census tract), (NEW PARAGRAPH) to identify patterns of residential segrega tion. It is a relatively sophisticated technical procedure for describing the main elements of urban socio spatial structure (cf. sociaL area anaLysis). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Davies (1984). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
factors of production
The ingredients necessary to the production process; that is, those things that must be assembled at one place before production can begin. The three broad headings conventionally adopted are land, labour and capital. Sometimes the fourth factor of ?enterprise? is added, to recog nize the contribution of the ?entrepreneur? or risk taker and the legitimacy of a special return to this participant in the productive process. However, in the current complexity of economic organization, it is hard to distin guish enterprise from general management functions, so this factor is more appropriately subsumed under labour. The combination of factors of production reflects the state of technology applied in the activity in question; for example, whether it is capital intensive or labour intensive. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Land is necessary for any productive activ ity, whether it is agriculture, mining, manufac turing or services. Land may be a direct source of a raw material, as with mining, or it may be required for the cultivation of a crop or to support the physical plant of a manufacturing activity. Modern industry requires increasing quantities of land, as factory sites and for such associated uses as storage, roadways and parking. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Labour requirements vary with the nature of the activity in question. Some need numerous unskilled workers while others require more skilled operatives, technicians, office person nel and so on. The availability of particular types of labour can have an important bear ing on the location of economic activity. Despite the growing capital intensity of mod ern industry, cheap labour with a record of stability is still an attraction. That the value of production can ultimately be traced to the factor of labour is central to the Labour theory of value. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Capital includes all things deliberately cre ated by humans for the purpose of production. This includes the physical plant, buildings and machinery (i.e. fixed capital: cf. sunk costs) plus the circulating capital in the form of stocks of raw materials, components, semi finished goods and so on. Private ownership of capital and land is the major distinguishing feature of the capitalist mode of production, which carries with it important implications for the distribution of income and wealth (see marx ist economics; neo classical economlcs). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The conventional categories of land, labour and capital (and enterprise) can serve an ideological role in legitimizing the differential rewards of the various contributors to pro duction under capitalism. The concept of productive forces is preferred in socialist eco nomics. In any event, for practical purposes these broad categories tend to be subdivided into the individual inputs actually required in particular productive activities. dms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Smith (1981). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
fair trade
The demand that producers from poorer countries should not be denied the legitimate maximum rewards from their sales by the actions of richer countries or other powerful agents. Fair trade campaigns go back a long way and embrace several related issues. Indian nationalists complained about a system of Imperial Preferences and asked for a measure of protection to help set up infant industries in areas such as iron and steel. In the 1950s, Oxfam took a lead in promoting fair trade ideas under the slogan ?Helping by Selling?. Similar ideas were taken up in the 1960s, when many African countries demanded ?trade not aid?. This slogan became the motif of the first UN Conference on Trade and Development, held in Geneva in 1964. Other trade justice campaigns have complained about export dumping by richer countries. Still others worry about pressures being placed on developing countries to liber alise their own markets too quickly. Ha Joon Chang (2002) has charged that almost all of today?s advanced industrial economies bene fited from protection. Now, however, they and their representatives in the international monetary fund (imf) and world trade organization (wto) want to kick away that ladder to success in the developing world (see neo liberalism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Campaigns to ensure more open and equit able access to richer markets for developing world producers continue to be important in the fair trade pantheon. Developing countries pressed for liberalization of agricultural markets in the European Union and North America during the World Trade Organization talks held in Hong Kong in (NEW PARAGRAPH) (Stiglitz and Chorlton, 2006). The fair trade issue was also pushed strongly by the Make Poverty History campaign. Sugar pro ducers in West Africa or the Caribbean will not receive a fair return for their crop when coun tries in the richer world offer large subsidies to domestic producers of sugar cane or beet. More recently, fair trade campaigners have put the spotlight on trade negotiations that link small producers to some of the world?s largest or most powerful companies. Take the case of coffee. How are small producers in Central America meant to strike fair deals with giant coffee purchasers when those same companies can use their immense purchasing power to strike better deals for themselves with producers in Brazil or Vietnam? The answer, in part, is for small producers to form co operatives. They can then work with cam paigning groups to persuade Starbucks and other coffee giants of the commercial value of selling ?fair trade? brands in their outlets. At this point, fair trade campaigns rub shoulders with calls for ethical consumption (Nicholls and Opal, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Questions of market access and fair trade also take shape within poorer countries. Many small producers in the developing world are hurt by governments that saddle them with paperwork. It has been reported that some banana growers in the Central African Republic take over 110 days to get their bananas on a ship to Europe, and need more than 35 signatures to get them on board. Each signature creates an opportunity for corrup tion, or rent seeking behaviour. Trading struc tures remain distorted, rather than open or developmental, and primary producers continue to lose out. sco (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Stiglitz and Charlton (2006). See also www. makepovertyhistory.org (NEW PARAGRAPH)
falsification
The criterion proposed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902 94) to demarcate science from non science. In Popper?s view, only statements capable of falsification that is, those possessing the cap ability of empirical refutation were scientific. Statements that could not be falsified that is, those unable to be proved wrong were non scientific. For Popper, the division between falsifiable and non falsifiable state ments was inviolate, allowing consistent sep aration of science from non science (NEW PARAGRAPH) Popper first proposed falsification in his 1935 book Logik der Forschung (translated as The logic of scientific inquiry; Popper, 1959). It was written as a response to discussions at the Vienna Circle of logical positivism that he attended, although it was a group to which he was never admitted as a full member. Logical positivists argued for the principle of verification, according to which the truth of a scientific statement was given by its corres pondence to real world observations. Popper, dubbed by one member of the Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath, as ?the official opposition?, claimed to the contrary that scientific state ments were never verified, only falsified. Because no one is omnipotent, it is impossible to know whether in the future a scientific claim will be disproved by a disconfirming instance (and a single disconfirming instance is all that is required to refute a general claim). For example, the verified truth of pre eighteenth century natural scientists in europe that all swans were white was invalidated when Captain Cook sailed to australia and found black swans. The growth of scientific know ledge, as Popper (1963) would later claim, was based not on verifying theories, but on falsify ing them, and in the process developing alter natives that were less worse; that is, not yet falsified. This was one of the basal proposi tions of Popper?s development of critical rationalism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn (1970 [1962]) provided the root of a trenchant critique of Popper?s position. Kuhn portrayed the trajectory of science as punctu ated by periods of fundamental change he called paradigm shifts; for example, the move from Newtonian to Einsteinian celestial mech anics. During such shifts, everything was in flux, Kuhn argued, including criteria offalsifica tion. Popper had made such criteria fixed and constant and yet, as Bernstein (1983, p. 71) later put it, ?data or evidence do not come marked ??falsification??.? Criteria of falsifica tion are moving elements, not existing outside of debate, and settled only after change has happened. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Falsification should have been an important criterion for geographers during the period of the quantitative revolution, when the dis cipline modelled itself most explicitly on the natural sciences. But it wasn?t. If anything, that disciplinary move was backed by logical (NEW PARAGRAPH) positivism, the very philosophy Popper thought he had dispatched in the 1930s. Alan Wilson (1972, p. 32), one of the leaders of geography?s quantitative revolution, did suggest the importance of falsification in a 1972 statement: ?The essence of the scientific method . . . is an attempt to disprove theory to marshall observations to contradict the predictions of the theory.? But it was program matic, and never realized in Wilson?s practice, or the practices of anyone else in geography. This was precisely Kuhn?s point, and later developed in science studies: falsification could never be realized. tb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Popper (1963, pp. 33 9). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
family reconstitution
A method used in historical demography to create measure ments in the absence of data on demographic stocks and flows made available through censuses and vital registration that applies nominative linkage techniques to baptisms, marriages and burials recorded in parish registers (see Fleury and Henry, 1965). The technique can also be adapted for use with genealogies (see Henry 1956). It starts from a marriage and links baptisms and burials of children born to the couple as well as their subsequent marriages. Family reconstitution rules devised originally for use with French parish registers by Louis Henry have been adapted for use with registers elsewhere, with a view to establishing a population at risk or under observation so that age specific mor tality and fertility rates can be calculated. Marriage age can be derived by linking bap tisms and marriage dates and information can be extracted that will enable fecundity, birth and pre nuptial pregnancy rates to be computed (see Wrigley, 1966a). Linkage is far more successful where migration is low, and consequently cities and large towns have rarely benefited from the technique, which has been used primarily to reconstruct the popu lation of villages and smaller market towns (see Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen and Schofield, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . rms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wrigley (1966a); Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen and Schofield (1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
famine
A relatively sudden event involving mass mortalities from starvation within a short period. Famine is typically distinguished from chronic hunger, understood as endemic nutritional deprivation on a persistent basis (as opposed to seasonal hunger, for example). Definitions of famine are fraught with danger because (i) cultural, as opposed to biological, definitions of starvation vary around diverse, locally defined norms, and (ii) deaths from starvation are frequently impossible to distin guish from those from disease (NEW PARAGRAPH) Nearly all societies have periodically suf fered from the consequences of famine. The earliest recorded famine, which occurred in ancient Egypt, dates to 4000 bce; famine con ditions currently threaten parts of the Horn of Africa and parts of North Korea. The dynam ics and characteristics of mass starvation in modern times have similar structural proper ties, however; typically, such famines involve sharp price increases for stapLe foodstuffs, decapitalization of household assets, gather ing of wild foods, borrowing and begging, petty crime and occasionally food riots, and out migration. According to the Hunger Program at Brown University, the trend in famine casualties has been downward since 1945, but in the late 1980s states with a combined population of 200 million failed to prevent famine within their national borders. Hunger, and famine in particular, is intoler able in the modern world, however, because it is unnecessary and unwarranted (Dreze and Sen, 1989). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Famine causation has often been linked to natural disasters, population growth and war, which produces a reduction in the food supply (Malthus, 1970 [1798]). But some major fam ines (e.g. Bengal in 1943) were not preceded by a significant decline in food production or absolute availability, and in some cases have been associated with food export. Recent ana lyses have focused on access to and control over food resources sometimes called the food availability decline hypothesis. Sen (1981) argues that what we eat depends on what food we are able to acquire. Famine, therefore, is a function of the failure of socially specific entitlements through which individuals com mand bundles of commodities. Entitlements vary in relation to property rights, asset distri bution, cLass and gender. Famine is therefore a social phenomenon rooted in institutional and political economic arrangements, which determine the access to food by different classes and strata (Watts, 1983a). Mass pov erty and mass starvation are obviously linked via entitlements. Mass poverty results from long term changes in entitlements associated with social production and distribution mech anisms; famines arise from short term changes in these same mechanisms. Famine and endemic deprivation correspond to two forms of public action to eradicate them: famine policy requires entitlement protection to ensure that it does not collapse among vulner able groups (i.e. landless labourers, women). Chronic hunger demands entitlement promo tion to expand the command that people have over basic necessities (Dreze and Sen, 1989). Since 1945 India has implemented a success ful anti famine policy, yet conspicuously failed to eradicate endemic deprivation. China, con versely, has overcome the structural hunger problem (even during the socialist period), but failed to prevent massive famine in the 1950s. africa has witnessed a catastrophic growth in the incidence of both mass starva tion and chronic hunger (de Waal, 1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The role of state policy and of humanitar ian aid figures centrally in the discussions of famine and famine causation. While the public sphere is key in understanding how and why the right to food and the right not to be hungry are made effective, the recent history of famine shows clearly how the state can use famine and humanitarian aid for explicitly political purposes. The case against Stalin and the Ukrainian famine is clear in this regard, and the catastrophic Chinese famine of the late 1950s is a compelling instance of how inept state policies to achieve rapid industriaLization backfired, but also how an authoritarian state ignored famine signals and colluded in the deaths of 20 million people (Becker, 1997). Sen (1981) has argued that famines rarely occur in societies in which there is freedom of the press (and in which states are therefore held to be accountable in some way). Humanitarian assistance has also been an object of critique insofar as it itself becomes politicized (and rendered as a business), and often fails to be more than a short term palliative (rather than assisting in the rehabilitation and reconstruction of famine devastated communities; de Waal, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Davis (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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