Labour branching, redundancy and livelihoods: Towards a more socialised conception of adaptation in evolutionary economic geography

The question of how economic landscapes evolve and adapt over time has attracted recurring interest in economic geography and regional development studies. This has been reinforced by the emergence of a more explicit evolutionary economic geography (EEG) in recent years, emphasising the role of inherited capabilities and experiences in shaping local and regional development trajectories. Yet the underlying process of adaptation in terms of how different actors respond to economic change has been subjected to little critical scrutiny, particularly from a broader social agency perspective. In response, this paper is concerned with how labour as a social actor adapts to economic change. Its key contribution is to re-deploy the notion of regional branching from its association with firms and technologies to assess how workers move into new economic activities. Such labour branching assumes both voluntary and involuntary forms, and this paper concentrates on the latter by assessing workers' responses to redundancy. The concept of involuntary labour branching is expanded and socialised beyond the established plant closure literature through an engagement with research on livelihoods and economic practices. This is reflected in the incorporation of three case studies from the global North and South: Longbridge, UK; Nowa Huta, Poland; and Luanshya, Zambia. The degree of industry and skill relatedness generally proved limited across the cases compared to the emphasis on technological or skill relatedness in the industrial branching literature, reflecting the fact that redundancy was linked to the broader decline of pre-displacement and related industries.