This paper develops a perspective of fashion as a complex, multidimensional form of knowledge and as a technology of garment mass production. It identifies the various modalities of fashion knowledge and characterises their different rates and extents of transmission across space and time in terms of their relative complexity. The paper explores the spatio-temporal configurations of fashion knowledge as it is mobilised in the economy, interrogating the ways in which the uneven viscosity of its different modalities vary with their positioning in geographical space and in relation to other modalities. It then assesses the economic implications of fashion's place-specific recombinations. These interactions are demonstrated by an examination of the impacts of international fashion trends on fashion garment supplies to the Australian market. The perspective outlined in this paper highlights the inadequacies of the tacit-codified binaries that have dominated geographies of knowledge and shows why the transmission of fashion ideas consolidates rather than diminishes the power of key sites of expert knowledge.

As governments become increasingly concerned about the fiscal implications of the ageing population, labour market policies have sought to encourage mature workers to remain in the labour force. The 'human capital' discourses motivating these policies rest on the assumption that older workers armed with motivation and vocational skills will be able to return to fulfilling work. This paper uses the post-redundancy recruitment experiences of former Ansett Airlines flight attendants to develop a critique of these expectations. It suggests that policies to increase older workers' labour market participation will not succeed while persistent socially constructed age-and gender-typing shape labour demand. The conclusion argues for policies sensitive to the institutional structures that shape employer preferences, the competitive rationality of discriminatory practices, and the irresolvable tension between workers' human rights and employers' property rights. KEY WORDSage / discrimination / recruitment / older workers / flight attendants

When studies of industrial organisation are informed by commodity chain, actor network or global production network theories and focus on tracing commodity flows, social networks or a combination of the two, they can easily overlook the less routine trans-sectoral associations that are crucial to the creation and realisation of value. This paper shifts attention to identifying the sites at which diverse specialisations meet to concentrate and amplify mutually reinforcing circuits of value. These valorisation processes are demonstrated in the case of Australian Fashion Week, an event in which multiple interests converge to synchronize different expressions of fashion ideas, actively construct fashion markets and enhance the value of a diverse range of fashionable commodities. Conceptualising these interconnected industries as components of a transsectoral fashion complex has implications for understanding regional development, world cities, production location and the manner in which production systems 'touch down' in different places.

Policies designed to hasten the closure of high-emissions coal-fired power stations routinely include reference to the need for a 'just' transition in affected communities. But the detail of what a just transition might entail is rarely specified. This article examines how policy interventions in Australia in 2012-2013, as part of the Gillard government's Clean Energy Future package, approached the problem of a just transition in the case of Victoria's coal dependent Latrobe Valley. It describes how policymakers framed the issue as transition, adopted a regional scaling, and expanded the territorial arena of policy action. A stakeholder-based multilevel governance committee shrouded this top-down decision-making from public scrutiny. These moves made it possible to conjure a narrative of benign transition governed by market processes. The paper explains how these strategic framings sidelined local interests, misrepresented the issues, exacerbated local disempowerment, and enabled the redirection of re-distributional funding to communities that were not directly affected by the impending closure of coal-fired power stations. The perceived injustice of this process exposes the limitations of climate policy-related strategic issue, scale and place framing.

In an increasingly complex literature exploring the geographies of socially constructed scale, interest has focused on the relationship between scale, power and the contested political terrains through which these relations are played out. In this paper, I argue that these interactions must be understood in specific contexts, where shifts in scale are inextricably linked to shifts in the sources and instruments of power. By applying a scale perspective to the analysis of recent industrial relations legislation in Australia, I show that the nature and direction of rescaling is 'fixed' by the powers of institutional actors and the scope of their jurisdictions. I then draw on the distinctively scaled relations of the Australian context to assess the extent to which Australia's national rescaling processes can be seen as representing a process of convergence toward universal 'spaces of neo-liberalism'.