The Dictionary of Human Geography

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taken-for-granted world The realm of

everyday life, frequently unreflective, where

convention and routine prevail, leading to the

accumulation of the attitudinal norms and

habitual practices that define a subculture.

The taken-for-granted world was inspired

by humanistic geographythroughethno-

graphic and other interpretative methods

inspired by the philosophical traditions of

German constitutive phenomenology and

Americanpragmatism(Ley, 1977). Also rele-

vant is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept ofhabitus,

with its emphasis onclass-based subcultures

with varied resources to bring to everyday

social projects. The centrality ofpowerin

everyday life has been also been drawn out

more fully by the French philosophers

Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. dl

Suggested reading

Werlen (1993, ch. 3).

tariff A tax levied by a government on the

importation of acommoditymade abroad.

Governments impose tariffs on foreign-made

imports for multiple reasons, including to

protect domestic producers from foreign com-

petition, to correct a trade deficit, to give pref-

erence to imports from certain countries over

others, or, contrarily, to retaliate against an-

other country’s preferential tariff regime.

Preferential tariffs designed to privilege or

punish particular exporting countries date to

imperial trading practices, which were often

organized within networks of ‘imperial prefer-

ence’. But it was in the context of nineteenth-

centuryimperialismthat British industrialists

began the rhetorical inflation of free trade

and the political struggle to reduce tariffs

(Sheppard, 2005): they wanted to sell their

products to foreign and domestic markets,

and also saw the advantages of tariff-freefood

imports for feeding and maintaining a cheap

workforce (Merrett, 1996). Early economists

such as David Ricardo helped the industrialists

make their case with academic arguments

about the gains fromtrade, and until the

1930s, the cause of free trade and tariff reduc-

tion spread around the world, albeit within

limits created by inter-imperial struggles (in-

cluding the immense upheaval of the First

World War). During the Great Depression,

however, in the rush to protect their domestic

capitalists from the globalcrisisof over-accu-

mulation, governments imposed steep tariffs

on foreign imports. The resultant ‘tariff walls’

drastically reduced world trade and created

much more autarchic or self-contained na-

tional economies: this territorialization of

economies set the geographical pattern for the

distinctively nationalregimes of accumula-

tionbased onfordismthat characterized the

mid-twentieth century (see Lash and Urry,

1987; Harvey, 1989b; Mitchell, 1998, 2002d).

The Fordist pattern of economic national-

ization was also influenced by global politics,

the rise ofcommunismand, most notably, the

national mobilizations forced by the Second

World War. However, as the war drew to a

close, the cause of free trade was launched

again with the American-led meetings at Bret-

ton Woods, which led to the General Agree-

ment on Tariffs and Trade or GATT in 1947.

Some joke that GATT in fact stood for the

General Agreement to Talk and Talk, be-

cause, despite unending American pressure

and resulting rounds of talks, other countries

were reluctant to quickly remove their tariff

walls, as they faced the prospect of rebuilding

their war-torn economies. The USA, by con-

trast, had emerged from the war with its econ-

omy unscathed and eager to expand markets

for its products worldwide. American negoti-

ators pushed for a more open global free trade

system that could absorb the US trade surplus,

and slowly but surely they prevailed: the

crowning achievement was the establishment

of theworld trade organizationin 1994

(Peet, 2003). However, by the 1990s the US

trade surplus had turned into a large and fast-

growing deficit; thus, in the years since its

inception the WTO has had to deal with in-

creasing complaints by developing countries

that the USA is abandoning free trade and –

ironically albeit unsurprisingly – imposing tar-

iffs on foreign products (Wallach and Woodall,

2004). ms

Taylorism A set of workplace practices

developed from the principles of ‘scientific

management’ by the American engineer

Frederick W. Taylor (1911) from his

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 741 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju