Knowledge Production,Urban Locations and the Importance of Local Networks

This paper analyses the relationship between knowledge production and urban locations in industrial design, a knowledge-intensive business service (KIBS). KIBS concentrate in urban locations. This is often explained by the co-location of client firms and market access in large cities. Recent research on knowledge production, however, reveals that knowledge productive networks are significant for both the competitiveness and location of KIBS. Thus, to understand the urban location of industrial design, it is important to analyse how knowledge production is organized within the industry. Industrial design is concentrated in urban locations, but most of its clients are located elsewhere. Hence, it seems that industrial design firms concentrate in urban locations mainly because their knowledge networks include specific types of formal and informal local social networks.     

网络权力与企业投资空间决策——以台资网络为例

企业网络已成为全球经济运行中主要的组织创新形式。拥有核心能力和关键资源的企业成为网络的发起者和管理者,权力跨越企业边界演变成网络权力。网络权力已成为影响企业投资空间决策的重要因子之一。网络权力对网络成员跨界投资和区位决策的影响力源于其能降低生产成本、维持原供货联结与社会关系、优化投资政策、促进技术创新等。网络权力从某种意义上能转化成成本、政治、社会、市场等优势。全球生产网络的空间转移或扩张往往是由全球领导公司及其所控制下的地方网络领导公司的驱动或影响下形成的,生产型领导公司的网络权力使其在跨界生产扩张中能影响网络成员与其海外子公司毗邻定位,购买型领导公司网络权力能影响地方网络领导公司带动地方网络向成本低地或目标市场转移。     

Women Workers and the Promise of Ethical Trade in the Globalised Garment Industry: A Serious Beginning?

The paper gives an overview of the recent development within the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI), especially the development of corporate codes of conduct, and considers the prospects they offer for improving labour conditions for workers in the international garments industry. It argues that two specific features of the industry—competitive production systems based on international subcontracting and the use of predominantly female production workers—are likely to undermine the effective development of a codes-based strategy. Nevertheless, the labour rights agenda at the centre of ETI does provide a space for labour activists, whether operating in or out of formal union structures, to build campaigns and connections around global production networks.     

Global Value Chains and Open Networks: The Case of Italian Industrial Districts

Italian district small and medium enterprises (SMEs) developed aggressive strategies to extend their sales networks and supply chains abroad. Literature on districts offered alternative explanations about the impacts of internationalization on local manufacturing systems. The authors consider the evolution of Italian districts in the framework of global value chain approach, focusing on the role of leading firms. Based on a survey of 650 Italian SMEs and financial indicators, the paper describes the rise of a new district firm model, the open network, which becomes a key node of global value chains. The paper also analyses the relationships among internationalization, innovation strategies and performance of SMEs.     

Firm agency and global production network dynamics

The Global production networks (GPN) framework has been influential in the analysis of globally coordinated economic arrangements. However, research on GPNs tend to focus on a well-established industries and their existing governance structures with a very little attention to the temporality and changes in these networks and their governance structures. Specifically, despite the central role of ‘lead-firms’ in GPNs, the literature lacks a clear depiction of their competitive and evolutionary trajectory. In response, this paper is concerned with (re)opening the ‘black-box’ of firms and showing how lead-firms’ strategies and practices shape the evolutionary dynamics of GPNs. The paper argues that changing lead firm strategies play a crucial role in shaping the evolution of GPNs, reflecting changes in the industrial and/or business and institutional environments. The paper investigates the Danish, multinational energy company, Ørsted, and discusses the importance of accounting for firm dynamic capabilities, i.e. intra-firm practices and extra-firm (evolutionary) dynamic drivers, in analytical frameworks that analyse GPN dynamics and industries. Lead-firm strategies are shaped by firm-specific capabilities, industry-specific competitive dynamics, and institutions. Accordingly, GPNs’ evolutionary process can be understood as an adapting and/or response mechanism by lead-firms to changes in local and international business as well as multi-scalar institutional environments.     

'Globalizing' regional development: a global production networks perspective

Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to 'hold down' the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks – such as the global commodity chain approach – has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms' production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between 'globalizing' processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the 'strategic coupling' of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development.     

Innovations, Competitiveness and Local Embeddedness: A Study of Machinery Producers in Sweden

This paper is about technological relations and firm performance in the Swedish machinery industry. Taking its point of departure in the proliferating literature on the localized nature of learning and innovation processes, the paper sets out to answer three empirical questions: To what extent are firms integrated in localized production systems based on buyer-supplier relations? At what geographical level–local/regional, national or international–are the most important technological relations found? Is there a correlation between localized technological relations and the technological performance of firms? The results indicate that few firms display localized buyer-supplier relations. Rather, the industry is highly internationalized, with the most important customers and competitors located outside Sweden. In terms of technologically important relations, the domestic arena seems to be more important. The majority of the most important technological relations link the machinery producers to other actors in Sweden. Three out of four firms may be classified as predominantly local/regional or national in their technological relations, or technology profile. This survey therefore supports the notion that there exists both local/regional and national innovation systems. Finally, however, despite the fact that most firms are fairly locally embedded in their technology relations, there is no evidence that such embeddedness shows up as superior firm performance, in terms of technology level or innovative capacity.     

Local and Regional Development in Global Value Chains,Production Networks and Innovation Networks: A Comparative Review and the Challenges for Future Research

Globalization as a process has developed exponentially over the past 20 years, generating multiple and opposite effects for local and regional development (LoRD). This has created both new opportunities as well as raising new threats for local actors, both public and private. This special issue sets out to consider the prospects for LoRD in this context. Our aim in the introductory article is to consider how globalization may bring about LoRD. We do this through a comparative review of three critical analytical frameworks that have been used in recent years to examine the changing dynamics of globalization and their consequences for local production systems, namely global value chains, global production networks and global innovation networks. We provide an overview of these distinct approaches, identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Our argument is not that any one of these approaches is necessarily “better” than the others, but rather that to formulate a more complete and dynamic territorial perspective on regional development in the context of globalization, there needs to be an attempt at (eclectically) integrating the elements of these three distinct frameworks. The article then goes on to show how individual contributions in this special issue push forward this agenda, drawing on these distinct analytical frameworks to consider the transformative prospects for LoRD.     

Communications, innovation, and territory: the production network of Swift Meat Packing and the creation of a national US market

This study is an historical and theoretical account of how market territory, configured from flows of production and trade, gets reshaped by the innovative behavior of business firms. The research for this study focuses on the production network developed in the late nineteenth century by the American firm of G.F. Swift & Company. The central theme of this case is how businesses reorganize their strategies, routines and structure as transport and communications technology changes, and how the innovations in production networks engineered by firms as part of this reorganization, become territorially embedded and reconfigure the space for economic activity. The production network pioneered by Swift from railroad and telegraph technology, created long-distance production and trade linkages in the economy that widened the boundaries of formerly-localized markets, and established the foundations of a more geographically-extended, nationally-oriented market space. As it widened market boundaries, however, the network of Swift concentrated economic activity in new places. The essay builds a theoretical framework of the route from the ‘communications revolution,’ to the process of innovation in the firm, to the production network, to territorial transformation. This framework reveals how the railroad and telegraph revolution enabled firms in the US to develop innovations in production networks on the basis of vertically-integrated, geographically-dispersed enterprises organized over a national market space. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved     

Eating Hawai'i: local foods and place-making in Hawai'i Regional Cuisine

In this paper, we look at what it means to ‘eat Hawai'i’ and examine how Hawai'i Regional Cuisine (HRC) imagines, produces, and consumes place through particular constructions of local foods. The term ‘local’ attaches to foods as a marker of numerous positive attributes such as seasonal, sustainable, and community-based. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic research on Hawai'i Island, we examine spatial and discursive constructions of local and how this particular cuisine places itself in local food networks while simultaneously using place to localize itself within the Island's food networks. Using a case study approach to carefully contextualize localness, we show how Merriman's Restaurant and HRC complicate notions of alternative and local food systems in its discursive and material production and reproduction of Local food and locally grown food.     

旅游产业集群的企业网络属性研究——以平遥古城为例

由于旅游产业的特殊性,旅游产业集群内旅游企业间关系和合作并不是建立在投入-产出的物质联系上,旅游产业集群的企业网络也就有不同于制造业集群的属性和特征。根据四种划分标准可以将旅游产业集群的企业网络分为四种不同的类型;根据对平遥古城的调查和利用社会网络分析方法对数据分析发现,以沟通联系和非正式合作为主要内容的非正式网络为主;位于网络中心位置的主要是旅游核心部门或具有一定行业地位的企业;旅游企业本地网络的范围和结网对象与地理空间及个人关系相关;旅游产业集群的企业网络具有本地化网络对集群创新和竞争力提升有重要影响。     

Networking and learning for tourism innovation: evidence from the Western Cape

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the nature of networking and learning by tourism firms in relation to accessing knowledge for innovation. In particular, the nature of tourism learning and networking, geography of networking linkages, and systemic characteristics of relationships between tourism firms, government agencies, higher education institutions, and other organisations in the Western Cape tourism system are examined. The analysis draws on 182 tourism firm, tourism system, and contextual interviews. This investigation demonstrates that even though tourism firms mostly use internal resources for innovation, external, non-local knowledge is significant for enhancing novel innovation. It is disclosed that whilst local network linkages are dense, loose, and of importance for business and marketing purposes, extra-regional network relationships are imperative for learning in relation to innovation. As further observed, network linkages between local and regional actors for supporting tourism innovation in the Western Cape are generally weak which points to the underdevelopment of local and regional innovation networks or systems. The paper provides planning recommendations for enhancing the competitiveness of tourism firms towards fostering development and growth in the regional tourism economy. Specifically, support for stimulating learning networks as well as strengthening systemic relationships in the Western Cape tourism system are recommended. It is underscored that strategic relationships with non-local partners need to be nurtured towards fostering tourism innovation and enhancing regional competitiveness.     

Localized mobility clusters: impacts of labour market externalities on firm performance

This article analyses the impact of labour market-induced externalitieson firm performance by using a unique database that connectsattributes of individuals to workplaces for the entire Swedisheconomy. Based on the analysis of 256,985 workplaces, our resultsshow that firms belonging to networks of local job mobility(i.e. ‘localized mobility clusters’) significantlyoutperform other similar firms within the local labour market.The results also indicate that concentrations of similar andrelated firms do not explain any considerable part of the variationsin firm competitiveness. Labour market externalities derivedvia local job mobility produce significantly more powerful effectsfor the involved firms as compared to the degree of co-location,diversity and scale.     

Regional innovation systems and the foundation of knowledge intensive business services. A comparative study in Bremen,Munich, and Stuttgart,Germany

Knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) are believed to be one of the main drivers of technological change, innovation, and economic progress. Although firm foundations play a crucial role among KIBS, entrepreneurship research has hardly ever investigated the sector. As firm founders in early stages of their firms' development mostly draw on regional resources, and as the provision of the services is an interactive process, “proximity” between the different actors of the particular territorial innovation and production system clearly matters. This contribution analyses the interrelationships between KIBS foundations and their respective innovation and production systems by performing qualitative and conceptual in-depth studies of three German metropolitan regions.     

Culture/economy and spaces of economic practice: positioning households in post-communism

Many recent attempts to understand the role of household food production and forms of reciprocal inter-household networks in 'post-communist' East Europe have argued that such economic activities represent a rational response to the austerity brought by economic decline and contracting incomes during the 'transition to capitalism'. Through an exploration of the spaces of household economic practice concerned with food production on family plots of land and with inter-household networks of reciprocity, this paper argues that such activities can be better situated within the context of the articulation between deep-seated and long-standing economic practices imbued with cultural significance and current practices in the formal, emerging capitalist economy. The paper explores the inter-section and interweaving of these 'cultural' and 'economic' practices through the lens of the largely non-market production of surplus product, value and exchange in and between households. It draws upon research with households in two contrasting sites in Slovakia, and highlights the significance of an historical and more nuanced understanding of the constitution of conventionally conceived 'survival strategies' in East-Central Europe. Such a consideration of the almost 'mundane' practices of everyday household production and reciprocity enables an opening of our conceptions of economic forms in post-socialist societies.     

Firm networks,borders, and regional economic integration

Borders reduce interprovincial trade relative to intraprovincial trade. Using trade and firm ownership microdata over a 9-year period (2004–2012), we show firm ownership networks, like trade flows, diminish with distance and borders and that the estimated effect of provincial borders on trade may fall by almost 75% after accounting for firm networks. This suggests the weaker presence of firm networks across borders has a significant, although statistically imprecise, effect on interprovincial trade. These findings reinforce the view that understanding border effects require not only the identification of barriers to trade but also barriers to investment across borders.     

Externalities,Learning and Governance: New Perspectives on Local Economic Development

In spite of growing mobility of production and production factors, economic development is increasingly localized in economic agglomerations. This article reviews three partially overlapping perspectives on local economic development, which derive from three factors intensifying the localized nature of economic development: externalities, learning and governance. Externalities play a central role in the new geographical economics of Krugman and in new economic geography of clusters and industrial districts. The dynamics of local economic development are increasingly associated with evolutionary economic thinking in general and with collective learning in particular. Inter‐firm and extra‐firm organization has experienced considerable innovation in the last few decades. New institutional devices are based on the notions of commodity chain, cluster and milieu. These innovations introduce new issues of economic governance both at the level of industry and of territory.     

European cultural diplomacy: diaspora relations with Kazakhstan

Abstract

Cultural diplomacy using diasporic communities as facilitators of interaction between states has long been important. This article suggests a typology of networks of communication derived from a case study of long-established diasporas living in post-independence Kazakhstan and their relationship with their European ‘homelands’. The typology juxtaposes the official stance of homeland governments expressed in formal and legal provisions with the lived experience of the diaspora communities. The study highlights the benefits of developing vibrant ‘valued’ networks of communication embracing both local diasporas and homeland embassies and agencies. In such cases, diplomatic benefits accrue to the homeland and local communities are empowered. Similarly, failing to capitalise on positive sentiment with some infrastructural support may leave an ‘expressive’ network as one of neglected potential.     

DOES AGGLOMERATION MATTER EVERYWHERE?: NEW FIRM LOCATION DECISIONS IN RURAL AND URBAN MARKETS*

We test whether commonly used measures of agglomeration economies encourage new firm entry in both urban and rural markets. Using new firm location decisions in Iowa and North Carolina, we find that measured agglomeration economies increase the probability of new firm entry in both urban and rural areas. Firms are more likely to locate in markets with an existing cluster of firms in the same industry, with greater concentrations of upstream suppliers or downstream customers, and with a larger proportion of college‐educated workers in the local labor supply. Firms are less likely to enter markets with no incumbent firms in the sector or where production is concentrated in relatively few sectors. The same factors encourage both stand‐alone start‐ups and establishments built by multiplant firms. Commuting decisions exhibit the same pattern as new firm entry with workers commuting from low to high agglomeration markets. Because agglomeration economies are important for rural firm entry also, policies encouraging new firm entry should focus on relatively few job centers rather than encouraging new firm entry in every small town.     

官治与自治之问：清末州县劝学所述评

内容提要 在清末的兴学热潮中,州县出现了一个新机构——劝学所。劝学所总董和劝学员由本地人担任,办学经费主要是自筹,职权上包揽地方一切办学事务,具有很强的自治特点。但是,由于当时地方自治并未成立,劝学所更多的是秉承提学使指令,并在地方官的监督下开展工作,所以只是一个半官治半自治的机构。随着劝学所的出现,州县社会中出现了一个劝学绅董群体,他们的权力直接来源于官府的札委,职责范围涉及官办学务和自治学务两个方面。虽然他们并没有被纳入正式官员的行列,但却具有正式权力,成为半官半绅、亦官亦绅的双面人物。劝学所的这一特点充分反映了清末地方机构改革中新旧交替的内在矛盾和基本特征。