Spatialising industrial relations Al Rainnie, Andrew Herod and Susan McGrath Champ ABSTRACT In this article, we argue for a deeper and more theoretically informed engagement between the fields of industrial relations and geography. We lay out a number of concepts developed more fully by geographers and show, through four vignettes, how such concepts can add to our understanding of industrial relations practices. [W]hat gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. Instead . . . of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this, in turn, allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with a wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local [Massey, 1993: 155]. Hopefully we should soon see an increase in IR citations of economic geographers [Kelly, 2004: 191]. INTRODUCTION Social life—of which industrial relations (IR) constitute an important part—is fun- damentally spatial. People and the institutions within which they are imbricated (firms, labour unions, families) do not exist in a geographical vacuum, as if suspended from the air. Unlike angels, people do not live life on the points of needles or on the heads of pins. Rather, they are embedded in particular spatial relationships and structures, such that even in an age of rapid mobility and interaction between places, it still takes effort, time and resources for social actors to cross space, to engage with actors located elsewhere. The result of this fact is that the geographical relationships within which people find themselves significantly shape the possibilities for their social relationships. Hence, something as simple as ensuring that a factory can manufacture goods necessitates that workers pass through its gates every day, which in turn requires that they live within a sufficient proximity that they do not spend all day commuting. This means that the temporal balance between work and non-work in any given day will be reflective of the degree of proximity between workers’ homes and where they work—more time spent at work usually means workers must live ❒ Al Rainnie is Professor at the Centre for Labour Market Studies, University of Leicester. Andrew Herod is Professor of Geography, Department of Geography, University of Georgia. Susan McGrath Champ is Senior Lecturer, Work and Organisational Studies, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Sydney. Correspondence should be addressed to Professor Al Rainnie, CLMS, University of Leicester, 7-9 Salisbury Road, Leicester LE1 7QR, UK. Industrial Relations Journal 38:2, 102–118 ISSN 0019-8692 © 2007 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Rd, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA.