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This volume explores ways of thinking about and understanding economies, in the plural, as geographically differentiated phenomena. In contrast to the singular worldview of mainstream economics, economic geographer Jamie Peck makes the case for studying economic worlds, and lives, and transformations from the ground up, recognizing how place and situation really matter.

Offshore outsourcing - the movement of jobs to lower-wage countries - is one of the defining features of globalization. Routine blue-collar work has been going offshore for decades, but the digital revolution beginning in the 1990s extended this process to many parts of the service economy too. Politically controversial from the beginning, "offshoring" is conventionally seen as a threat to jobs, wages, and economic security in higher-income countries-having become synonymous with the dirty work of globalization. Even though the majority of corporations make some use of offshore outsourcing, fearful of negative publicity most now choose to manage these activities in a discreet manner. Partly as a result, the global sourcing business, now reckoned to be worth more $120 billion, largely operates under the radar, its ocean-spanning activities in low-cost labor arbitrage being poorly documented and poorly understood. Offshore is the first sustained investigation of the workings of the global sourcing industry, its business practices, its market dynamics, its technologies, and its politics. The book traces the complex transformation of the worlds of global sourcing, from its origins in the new international division of labor in the 1970s, through the rapid growth of back-office economies in India and the Philippines since the 1990s, to the development of "nearshore" markets in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Recently, this evolving process of geographical and organizational restructuring has included experiments in "backshoring" within low-cost, ex-urban locations in the United States and a wave of software-enabled automation, which threatens to remove labor from many back offices altogether. In these and other ways, the offshore revolution continues

In conversation with Quinn Slobodian's Crack-up capitalism, the commentary explores the book's innovative but for the most part implicit methodological and expositional strategy, reflecting on some of the implications for the geographical analysis of ideas and ideation. Ideation certainly matters, but never mechanically or predictably, so the challenging questions concern how to specify, and to assign explanatory weight to, particular ideas in particular situations.

The article introduces a book forum on Isabella Weber's book, " How China Escaped Shock Therapy." The book is notable not only for the way that it reinterprets, substantively and theoretically, the story of China's world-altering economic transformation, but also for the truly original kind of book that it is.

How do economic geographers determine where to begin their research projects, where to locate and delimit their case studies, where and how to "cut in" to problems? In the absence of self-evident or pregiven answers to these questions, the problem-cum-choice of where and how to start is inescapably tangled up with issues of preliminary conceptualization and indeed theorization, since cases are not so much found as made, being in various ways coproduced with different "theory-method packages." There is (and can be) no singular or universal answer to these questions. Instead, this brief intervention outlines one rationale for getting "started," founded as such rationales should be with reference a particular approach or mode of theorization. The approach here centers on the problematic of recombinant development, on the role of extended case-study designs, and on the still sparsely realized potential of conjunctural modes of analysis.

This paper introduces an Exchange section dedicated to the question of the new state capitalism. It is suggested that the new state capitalism, both as an ascendant concept and as marker of socioinstitutional facts on the ground, signals a significant geohistorical moment, perhaps not a new "era" as such, but a notable inflection point. This warrants critical attention, even if first-generation treatments of the phenomenon itself may have been somewhat wanting. Contributions follow from Ilias Alami, Jennifer Bair, Isabella Weber, Marion Werner, and Heather Whiteside, each of whom provide a critical take on (debates around) the new state capitalism from their own theoretical perspective and vantage point.