Review Sheet Economic Geography Final Exam, Spring 2009

The final exam will be similar to the two midterm exams with the addition of a question that asks you to explain the geographical themes in a newspaper article. Be sure to review lecture outlines, your notes, italic terms in your text, and end of the chapter questions. Use the outline below to organize your studying. Not every concept or idea is on this outline. The second exam covers material on:

Transnational Corporations

  • Characteristics of TNC production chains
    • Internal and external transactions
  • Factors governing the location of TNC headquarters, R&D facilities, and production
  • Geographical implications of inter-firm relationships including:
    • Commercial and Industrial Subcontracting
    • Strategic Alliances and Joint Ventures
    • Franchising
  • Limits of TNCs including time-space compression, organized resistance and social and cultural barriers.
Labor

  • Assess the general idea that labor is less mobile than capital.
  • The "control" of labor by corporations
    • What are the ways that corporations and states control labor?
    • Local Labor Control Regimes
  • Spatial strategies of labor including:
    • Proactive migration
    • Workplace resistance
    • Action in place
    • Upscaling Worker action.
Consumption

  • What is involved in consumption?
  • Three perspectives on who has power in consumption decisions including:
    • Consumer sovereignty
    • Consumer as dupe
    • Culturalist perspective
  • Central place theory. Can you explain and illustrate the theory with a diagram?
  • Globalization of Retailing
  • What are the trends in retail location at the rural scale?
  • Spaces of consumption
Culture
  • How do ways of thinking, practices, social relationships, and power relationships differentiate firms?
  • What is the importance of cultural differences within the firm?
  • What is the importance of cultural differences on national and regional scales?

Gender and Ethnicity

  • How has traditional economics treated gender and ethnicity? How is economic geography different?
  • What are the trends for women in the workforce?
  • How and why are jobs and workplaces gendered?
  • How do gender differences combine with geography to limit women in their job search?
  • How are occupations segmented by ethnicity?
  • What are the geographical determinants of ethnic occupational sorting and how do they operate?
  • Ethnic entrepreneurship
  • Transnational ethnic geographies.

 

 

 

 

Back