Biography

My work as a researcher, writer and teacher has been centred on the political economy of localities and regions. In the 1970s and 1980s I was a policy researcher on urban industries and economy, focused on London. (For more detail see Education and Employment below). In 1988 – 91 I was a Research Fellow in the School of Management at Sheffield University.

From 1993 until my retirement in 2017 I was a university lecturer in the geography departments of Sydney University and Northumbria University and the urbanism department of Sheffield University. My writing has ranged over a number of fields: the labour process, local economies, and their cyclical development; the relations between economy and social life within localities; local economic and development strategies, emphasising their political varieties from right to left; poverty, its spatial construction, and the variety of political strategies towards it; theories of economic regimes (institutionalist, regulationist, Marxist); theories of political economic periods, particularly Keynesianism/ neoliberalism; abstract theory of the scaling of the capitalist economy; more concrete analyses of the scaling of politics in contemporary Europe.

In my retirement I am continuing my academic writing; I am currently working on book entitled Localisms: contradictions and political variety. I have been an activist in the gay movement, the squatting movement, and in my trade unions. I have written for socialist publications and websites, and given educational talks and public lectures. I have recently started a political blog.

I discuss the evolution of my political and intellectual interests in Politics, research and writing below.