Varieties of Innovation and Welfare Regimes: The Leap from R&D Projects to the Development of City-regions

In the varieties of capitalism, welfare capitalism, and systems of innovation literatures, the university is a critical actor as public employer, trainer and provider of several public goods. However, there is relatively weak enquiry into the spatial and institutional characteristics of university-led economic development and a relative neglect of the political economy and organizational features of embedded R&D projects in urban and regional planning. We argue that technical projects, far from being stand-alone entities, have taken on the broad characteristics of the university and city-regional development mandate in where they reside. The article is based on an exploratory study of university–industry R&D projects in six city regions of Finland. We show that: (a) the shifting role of universities reflects a changed context for the welfare state in which the “public” debate occurs; (b) These create distinct issues of legitimacy and coalition-building in local economic planning which give rise to diverse regional interpretations of single technology programmes; (c) We categorise three general types of models of R&D projects in universities and propose tentative categories of contributions to “public knowledge”. This diversity of interpretations and outcomes leaves us optimistic regarding the ability of city-regions to adapt and plan for the future against a changing welfare state that shapes the university's role, yet more cautious about any clear-cut “public knowledge” emerging from such technical projects.     

The Politics of Economic Diversification: Reconceptualizing the Rural Informal Sector in South-east Tanzania

This study examines how economic diversification is changing a Tanzanian village under economic liberalization. More specifically, it asks how different wealth groups are able to incorporate income-generating activities into their livelihood strategies. The conclusion is that while diversification (as a division of labour) is advanced at the village level, it appears that different activities enhance the division of the village into segregated cultural spheres and increase economic differentiation. At village level the diversity of income-generating activities reduces any single line of economic dependency either on the state or on market actors.     

The use of regulation and governance theories in research on post-socialism: the adaptation of enterprises in Vyborg1

This article deals with developments since the collapse of socialism in Vyborg, the former Finnish city transferred to the Soviet Union's north–west frontier in 1944. It assesses how enterprises founded during the socialist era, their heirs, and new Russian and foreign firms, have coped with economic change and adjusted to the new economic system. It also explains the evolution of hybrid forms of activity on the enterprise level and their impact on the development of Vyborg as a local economy. This paper shows that the traditions of socialism embodied in many enterprises' adaptation strategies have helped the public sector in financial crisis because enterprises have continued the socialist traditions to take care of fractions of public infrastructure.     

A northern Neolithic? Clay work,cultivation and cultural transformations in the boreal zone of north‐eastern Europe,c.5300–3000 bc

The adoption of pottery in eastern Fennoscandia in the later sixth millennium BC has traditionally been understood in straightforward technological and practical terms, and as a development that did not mark other significant changes in local culture or ways of life. Recent research in the region, combined with new ideas about Neolithization in Eurasia more generally, nonetheless suggests that the adoption of pottery was associated with more fundamental cultural and environmental transformations than has previously been thought. This article brings together diverse old and new data from north‐eastern Europe and discusses the character and dynamics of cultural and human‐induced environmental change following the adoption of pottery. The aim is to provide a scenario of long‐term cultural changes and, in particular, to consider the significance and broader implications of the very practices of clay use and cultivation, as well as their links to wider cultural and environmental phenomena.