Andrew Cook
Teaching Fellow and Research Associate, Faculty of Social Sciences
My broad teaching interests are in economic and social geography and focus upon the political economy of cities and regions; Eastern Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union; globalisation and uneven development and international finance and professional service firms.
At Nottingham I teach on the following undergraduate modules:
- L81148 - Tutorials (Year 1)
- L81001 - Countries in Transition (Year 1)
- F81250 - Cumbria Field Course (Year 1)
- L82167/L82154 - Economic Geography (Year 2)
- L83250 - History and Philosophy of Geography (Year 3)
- Undergraduate Dissertation
I also contribute to:
- Approaching Economic Geography (MSc Economy, Space and Society)
Current Research
I am an economic and social geographer with particular thematic interests in the transformation of the post-socialist states of Eastern Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union and the global professional services sector. These interests combine a long standing theoretical and practical foci upon the interaction between different forms of knowledge, power and practice in a variety of scalar contexts and speak to a series of ongoing trans-disciplinary debates spanning human resource management (HRM), organisational sociology, socio-legal studies and sociologies of education.
I have competitively won over £70,000 in research funding during my career to date.
Emerging Economies of Eastern Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union
I hold a long standard interest in the geographies of economic and social change in Eastern Central Europe (ECE) and the Former Soviet Union (FSU). My doctoral research focused upon the material spatial impacts of transnational elites (TNEs) in the former Czechoslovakia, examining how the everyday practices of these individuals contribute to the production of imagined and material spaces of exclusion. The core contribution of the research has been an exploration of the ways in which exclusionary spaces are produced through everyday practices that are, in turn, constrained and enabled by the possession and accumulation of different forms of capital (social, cultural and economic). The thesis focused upon three core areas, i) the role of TNEs in the production of luxury housing markets (Cook 2010), ii) the social practices of TNEs and the production of cliqued groups and exclusionary consumption spaces (Cook 2011) and, iii) the production of exclusionary everyday rhythms and time-space geographies (Cook in preparation). Elements of the research have been presented at major international conferences (Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, RGS-IBG Annual Conference and the European Urban and Regional Studies Conference), as research seminars (at the Universities of Nottingham and Newcastle) and as an invited contribution to a colloquium at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, exploring socio-economic transformations in the post-socialist states.
Globalisation and Professional Service Firms http://www.lancs.ac.uk/professions/professional_ed/
I also hold interests in the geographies of elite workers, labour markets and knowledge intensive producer service firms (KIPS). Whilst at Lancaster University, I worked on an ESRC grant funded project led by Dr James Faulconbridge and Prof. Daniel Muzio (Manchester Business School) entitled, "Professional Education, Global Professional Service Firms and the Cultures of Professional Work in Europe" (RES-000-22-2957). This project had a number of core objectives, i) to examine the selective recruitment strategies of firms and trends relating to accessibility for working class and ethnic minority groups, ii) to analyse the role of in-house training programmes, as well as 'preferred' external training providers, in the management of professional behaviours and cultures of work, iii) to investigate the implications of the training programmes used by firms for the regulation of the legal services sector in London, Milan and Frankfurt.
Future Research
Future research hinges around developing a research agenda surrounding several linked themes.
(i) Critical geo-economics of Money and Finance
(ii) Spaces of financial crime and criminality