CALL FOR PAPERS:
The Annual Spring Conference on the Political Economy of the World-
System will be held April 18-20, 1996 at Kansas State University
in Manhattan, Kansas
Theme: SPACE AND TRANSPORT IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM
Key metaphors in world-system analysis are profoundly spatial,
but there have been few systematic attempts to understand how
space, location, and topography affect world-system organization
and process. Most of the raw materials needed for industrial
production are located in specific places with particular
topographies that directly affect the organization of their
extraction and processing. Space and place constitute strategic
advantages and obstacles in the coordination of commodity chains.
National states plan and invest around problems of space in their
domestic territories as well as in their location within the world
economy.
The articulation and integration of core and periphery across
space depends on transport. As world systems incorporate more
space and transform more raw materials into commodities, material
flows across space and matter incorporated into particular built
environments increase as well. This increase creates requirements
and opportunities for scale-economic innovations in railways,
ports, loading and unloading equipment, and ships. These
innovations increase the amounts of inflexibly sunk capital in
vehicles and infrastructure, thereby fomenting incentives and
pressures for ever tighter coordination of transport systems across
regional and national boundaries. Because the costs and benefits
of building integrated transport systems around the globe are
unequally distributed, these systems contribute directly to the
creation and reproduction of inequalities and subordination in the
world-system.
In this sense, transport and transport systems provide a
critical medium for the structuring and periodic reorganization and
expansion of the world-system. The construction and regulation of
these complex systems provide a useful analytic window into the
interactions of technological, organizational, and political change
that occur as rising economies attempt to restructure world markets
for raw materials and finished goods to their own advantage.
Similarly, the construction of global air travel and
telecommunications networks have also had profound impacts on the
flows of goods, capital, people, and information in the world
economy. These networks have thus also helped reshape and
reproportion location, distance, and position in the world-system.
We invite papers that address these issues for presentation at
the Annual Conference of the Political Economy of the World-System,
April 18-20, 1996 at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
Possible themes include:
1) Technical and organizational innovations in transport as a
factor in hegemonic ascent and decline.
2) Differentiating aspects of space and the built environment in
core and periphery.
3) Transport as a component in raw materials access strategies.
4) Transport, location and information flows in the construction of
commodity chains.
5) Transport as a leading economic sector.
6) The interaction of transport and communication technologies in
transforming space and location in the world economy.
7) Transportation and communications as factors in human and
capital flows in the world economy.
One-page abstracts should be sent by January 1, 1996 to:
Paul S. Ciccantell Stephen G. Bunker
Department of Sociology Department of Sociology
Waters Hall 1180 Observatory Drive
Kansas State University University of Wisconsin
Manhattan, KS 66506 Madison, WI 53706
email: ciccant@ksu.ksu.edu!
Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu