John Pickles is Earl N. Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His publications include A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World (2004), Globalization and Regionalization in Post-socialist Economies: the Common Economic Spaces of Europe (edited, 2009), and Towards Better Work: Understanding Labour in Apparel Global Value Chains (co-edited with A. Rossi and A Luinstra, 2014). Adrian Smith is Professor of Human Geography and Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. Editor-in-Chief of the journal European Urban and Regional Studies, Dr. Smith has authored and co-edited five books on post-socialist Europe, including Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities (with A. Stenning, A. Rochovská, and D. Świątek, Wiley, 2010). Robert Begg is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Regional Planning at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Milan Buček is Professor and Head of the Department Public Administration and Regional Developmente at the University of Economics in Bratislava. Poli Roukova is a Senior Research Fellow in Economic and Social Geography at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Rudolf Pástor is Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department Public Administration and Regional Developmente at the University of Economics in Bratislava.
`Articulations of Capital is an intellectually refreshing and stimulating analysis of the shifts in the global apparel industry and its regional and local manifestations in East-Central Europe. Pickles and Smith excel in a theoretically and conceptually rich but empirically grounded critical approach that challenges some widely held assumptions about the contemporary apparel industry, postsocialism and East-Central Europe.' Petr Pavlinek, Professor of Geography, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA `This book presents a well grounded and historically contextualized analysis of the political economy of regional transformation in a changing world of apparel global production networks. I particularly like its focus on actually existing transitions in selected East Central European regional economies. In this way, the authors have eschewed the snapshot approach in most studies of inter-firm industrial governance and shed much better empirical light on the critical issue of industrial upgrading.' Henry Wai-chung Yeung, Professor of Economic Geography and Co-Director of the GPN@NUS Centre, National University of Singapore