In this article, we argue that prior organizations research has contributed to the erosion of the natural environment by failing to discriminate physical materiality from sociomateriality. The time–space attributes of physical materiality are more immutable than sociomateriality, so the compression of time and space in and by organizations is disrupting the cycles of the natural environment. We illustrate this point through the example of carbon markets. The development of futures and other financial derivatives contributes to the compression of time, whereas the movement of capital worldwide contributes to the compression of space. This time–space compression disembodies financial instruments from their physical target, namely, carbon, leading to the distortion of the instrument’s “real” value and hampering carbon emissions reductions. We call for organizational theories that more fully account for physical materiality.

No abstract

No abstract

Whether people appreciate the importance of saving for the future, and whether they intend to do so, are not well understood. On the basis of a representative sample of UK residents, we show that the perceived importance of pension planning is positively correlated with respondents' risk tolerance, age, and income, and whether their spouses participate in employer-sponsored pension plans. Those less likely to believe planning for the future is important are younger, earn less, are women, and will rely upon others for their expected retirement welfare. It is also apparent that generic sources of information provided remotely or at the national scale for individual and household pension planning, preparedness, and knowledge of annuities do not stand comparison with the perceived value of intimate and specialist advisory relationships. The unit of retirement planning is typically the household; it rarely functions at the region and national scales. To understand these findings better we frame their interpretation with reference to recent behavioural research that emphasises people's limited cognitive and social resources and the use of heuristics such as salience in setting priorities. Our findings have important implications for the scope and significance of the relational turn in economic geography.

In periods of turbulence, the tendency to simplify messages and polarise debates is nothing new. In our hyper-mediated world of online technologies, where it seems that even national policy can be forged in the 140 characters of Twitter, it is more important than ever to retain spaces for in-depth debate of emergent phenomena that have disruptive and transformative potential. In this article, we follow this logic and argue that to fully understand the diverse range of practices and potential consequences of activities uncomfortably corralled under the ambiguous term ‘the sharing economy’ requires not a simplification of arguments, but an opening out of horizons to explore the many ways in which these phenomena have emerged and are evolving. It is argued that this will require attention to multiple terrains, from diverse intellectual traditions across many disciplines to the thus far largely reactive responses of government and regulation, and from the world of techno-innovation start-ups to the optics of media (including social media) reporting on what it means to ‘share’ in the 21st century. Building on this, we make the case for viewing ‘the sharing economy’ as a matrix of diverse economies with clear links to past practices. We propose that to build a grammar for understanding these diverse sharing economies requires further attention to: (1) The etymology of sharing and sharing economies; (2) The differentiated geographies to which sharing economies contribute; (3) What it means to labour, work and be employed in sharing economies; (4) The role of the state and others in governing, regulating and shaping the organisation and practice of sharing economies; and (5) the impacts of sharing economies. In conclusion, we suggest that while media interest may fade as their presence in everyday lives becomes less novel, understanding sharing economies remains an urgent activity if we are to ensure that the new ways of living and labouring, to which sharing economies are contributing, work to promote sustainable and inclusive development in this world that ultimately we all share.