Hotels are spaces of temporary accommodation, but they are also important temporary spaces for an increasingly mobile and segmented workforce with different backgrounds and motives. In this paper we wish to address the temporary and transitional nature of hotel work by employing the term 'liminality'. More specifically, we analyse the hotel as a liminal space for transient workers that view this work as a temporary endeavour. By drawing upon data from a study of hotel workers in Norway, we discuss how the liminality of hotel work may be understood. Here, we turn to an important debate within tourism studies on the blurring relationships between consumer and producer identities in resorts, often referred to in terms such as 'working tourist' or 'migrant tourist-worker' (Bianchi, 2000). For a relatively privileged group of workers, the hotel becomes a space of liminal lifestyle pursuits as well as a space of work. We also contrast this privileged group with a different and less privileged liminal group of 'expatriate workers' (cf. Longva 1997). Bianchi (2000) highlights the potentially problematic effect of transient lifestyles and consumption of recreation, a problematic we wish to develop further by investigating how worker representation and solidarity develops in liminal spaces of work. While strategies of liminality may have a transformative impact on the individual, their aggregate effects might simultaneously alter the way in which hospitality work is negotiatedfrom the collective to the individual level. As such, hotels as employers of working tourists pose a great challenge to collective representation, and may undermine effective worker action for less privileged groups of workers. The final section of this paper addresses this challenge, asking what bearings the individualism that dominates liminal work spaces has for trade unionism in the hospitality industry.

The article examines changing employment relations in Norwegian warehouses, and conceptualises the increasing use of temporary agency workers as a redrawing of workplace geographies. The empirical basis for the analysis is four qualitative warehouse workplace studies, including focus group and interview data. The theoretical framework of the article combines an adapted version of the territory-place-scale-network (TPSN) framework developed by Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner and Martin Jones with the concepts of labour control and labour agency. The analysis shows how a networked recruitment system based on Swedish labour migrants, mediated via temporary work agencies, encourage workers to work their way through levels of employment insecurity in order to secure permanent employment. The article argues that the blurring and redrawing of legal boundaries through labour hire can be understood as a territorial strategy of control that affects the workplace as a scale of justice for trade unions. Moreover, the analysis shows how managerial control is conditioned by workers’ individual, habitual and collective agency.

While the concept of 'lock-in' has been popular as a catch-all concept for explaining negative externalities associated with entrenched institutions in old industrial regions, recent research suggests a more nuanced account centred on path-dependent evolution. More specifically, regional economic development and restructuring might be better understood if lock-in is studied in relation to other potentially co-evolving processes, such as economic adjustment and renewal. The article indicates patterns of structural change and reported innovations, and the authors question how lock-in has co-evolved with various processes of adjustment and renewal in the old industrial area of the Grenland region in Norway, focusing on the period between 2000 and 2011. They pay specific attention to various measures of restructuring in the process manufacturing industry, the related mechanical manufacturing industry, and the emergence of a local information and communications technology (ICT) industry. While the Grenland region displays elements of economic lock-in and a continued dependence on process manufacturing, it has experienced substantial structural shifts that suggest regional renewal.

The paper explores the regional dimensions of under-employment by analysing the uneven dispersion of part-time jobs in Greece. It understands under-employment as an integral dimension of contemporary flexible labour trends, triggered by devaluation and expanding amid crisis, although in diverse geographical and sectoral terms. It follows a methodology that comparatively analyses statistical data, relevant secondary sources and previous case studies, before moving to a theoretical contextualization of the findings. Based on this framework, NUTS-II level total employment and part-time work data are analysed through location quotients, and a new embellishment of shift-share analysis is implemented for 2005–2008 and 2009–2012 across nine sectors. The findings reveal four distinct, although porous, patterns of under-employment that are distinguished according to different regional productive specializations and the impact of structural or regional effects. The reasons why some regional economies, such as the tourist ones, were more resistant to employment losses, and at the same time the most keen on expanding part-time work, are scrutinized. Concluding, three deeper causal mechanisms, namely productive-technological, organizational and institutional, that determine the under-employment patterns revealed, are discussed and contrasted to relevant literature findings.

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