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since the 1980s, in which businesses contract
with third-party subcontractors to provide
product components and business services
such as accounting and customer relations.
Whether or not it is explicitly discussed in
terms ofpost-fordism, the recent explosion
in subcontracting and business-to-business
(‘B2B’) networking is widely associated with
the pressures to abandonfordistmodels of
vertical integration and develop more flexible,
market-mediated business practices in the
context ofglobalization. For the same rea-
son, outsourcing is often used synonymously
with ‘off-shoring’ in politicaldiscourse. In his
2004 campaign for the US presidency, for ex-
ample, Senator John Kerry assailed outsour-
cing by talking about ‘Benedict Arnold
corporations’. The implication in this analogy
with the eighteenth-century American traitor
(who had planned to surrender the American
fort at West Point to the British) is that out-
sourcing by US companies is a betrayal of
American independence. But outsourcing
need not necessarily involve sourcing from
foreign suppliers, and in fact is often based
on localized regional supply networks.
Indeed, economic geographers who study
thesenetworksare interested in the ways in
which they both depend upon and foster forms
of spatialagglomeration, because the eco-
nomic ties of outsourcing supply chains neces-
sitate diverse social and cultural ties –
‘untraded interdependencies’, as one leading
researcher calls them (Storper, 1997b) – in
order to function effectively. That said, even
some of these clustering effects have been
transnational in scope; for example, between
Western European clothing retailers and
Eastern European suppliers (see Smith, A.,
2003a). More generally, the increasing turn
to sourcing from foreign companies (from
Infosys in India, for example) has captured
the public imagination in North America
and Western Europe since the 1990s (e.g.
Engardio, 2006). Consequently, for critics,outsourcing has become widely associated
with the downward pressures on wages and
benefits that make the corporate search for
sourcing efficiency synonymous with a global
race to the bottom.
Since 9/11, outsourcing has been used in
arguments against ‘extraordinary rendition’ —
the clandestine US policy of sending suspected
terroristsabroad to be violently interrogated
by third parties in countries such as Egypt
and Syria (Smith, N., 2006a). There are obvi-
ous differences between this externalization of
interrogation and torture by government and
the externalization of business activities by
transnational corporations, but neo-liberal
commonalities underlie them, including the
use of private logistical services (such as rented
business jets) as well as the unaccountability in
the use of foreign third parties (Sparke, 2006).
By decrying extraordinary rendition as the
‘outsourcing of torture’, critics have suggested
in turn that it combines a sort of penal race to
the bottom with a twenty-first century betrayal
of American liberty (Mayer, 2005). msoverpopulation The idea that the size,
density or organization of an area’s population
is too great to be sustained. Neo-Malthusian
work argues that increased population reduces
an areas’ resource base until thecarrying
capacityis breached (seelimits to growth;
malthusian model). However, neo-Marxist
scholars have countered that overpopulation
makes a structural contribution to the con-
tinuation of certainmodes of production,
as an increased supply of potential workers
reduces wage rates (Harvey, 1974a). The
associated termsover-urbanization andover-
ruralizationhave sparked considerable debate,
with recent work on China supporting a
transition from anunder-urbanizedto an over-
urbanized society (Shen, 2002). ajbSuggested reading
Cohen (1999).Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_O Final Proof page 516 30.3.2009 7:51pmOVERPOPULATION