Teaching and Learning Guide

Introduction Knowledge, learning and innovation are now accepted as central features of the contemporary post‐industrial economy, leading to their study across a range of academic disciplines including economics, business and management studies, and the social sciences. Economic geographers have made distinctive contributions to these wider debates by highlighting the uneven spatial distribution of knowledge‐intensive production activities in certain regions of the global economy. Explanations for these patterns have usually relied on arguments about the embeddedness of economically valuable, predominately tacit forms of knowledge in local inter‐firm and social networks based on geographic proximity, and a common regional culture of shared institutions. However, more recent work in economic geography has increasingly begun to move away from this established focus, challenging the precedence given to the local or regional scale. The article examines this potentially important development by reviewing a series of literatures that, in different ways, represent alternative ways of understanding economic learning processes, often involving the movement of knowledge on a transnational scale. Author Recommends The first two entries here aim to position a novice reader in the wider field of knowledge and economic geography. The remaining recommendations are for key texts that reflect different perspectives covered in the Geography Compass article. 1. Mackinnon, D. and Cumbers, A. (2007), An Introduction to Economic Geography: Globalization, Uneven Development and Place. (Pearson Education Limited, Harlow). Chapter 10 of Mackinnon and Cumbers’ undergraduate textbook supplies a solid introduction to the place of knowledge and innovation in recent economic geography debates, although the focus is heavily weighted towards localised learning processes in clusters and learning regions. Emerging research exploring distanciated learning relations, by contrast, is given very short shrift. 2. Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1998), The Associational Economy: Firms, Regions and Innovation. (Oxford University Press, Oxford). This theoretically sophisticated but accessible, empirically grounded book is a good resource for students looking to deepen their understanding of regional theories of learning and innovation. Chapter 1 outlines a nonlinear, interactive model of innovation that underlies their argument for expanding the relevant level of study for these processes from the firm to the region. The book also contains four chapter‐length regional case studies, of which the first, on Baden–Württemberg is particularly valuable as an account of how the institutional structure of a classically innovative manufacturing region adapted to change in the global economy. 3. Bathelt, H., Malmberg, A. and Maskell, P. (2004), ‘Clusters and knowledge: local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation’, Progress in Human Geography 28 (1), pp. 31–56. DOI: 10.1191/0309132504ph469oa A much cited paper that extends the cluster model to encompass firms’ strategic linkages with select external partners. These linkages are conceptualised as ‘global pipelines’ through which firms can access new information and knowledge, and import it into the cluster where it spills over to become freely available as ‘local buzz’. It may also be a useful exercise for students to consider how this view of extra‐local relations compares with other positions in the literature covered in this Guide. 4. Amin, A. and Cohendet, P. (2004), Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capabilities, and Communities. (Oxford University Press, Oxford). Chapter 5 of this book is one of the strongest statements on distanciated learning in the economic geography literature. The authors develop the basis for a primarily relational instead of territorial understanding of the spatiality of knowledge, by recasting the focus of their analysis from firms located in regional ‘islands of innovation’ to the more globally connected network spaces of modern corporate organisation. Students may also find chapter 4 on Practices of Knowing rewarding, as this is where much of the theoretical groundwork for the subsequent reimagining of space is done. Here, they draw on bodies of literature including communities of practice, epistemic communities and actor‐network theory to develop an interpretation of organisational learning based on social connectivity and alignment. 5. Faulconbridge, J. R. (2006), ‘Stretching tacit knowledge beyond a local fix? Global spaces of learning in advertising professional service firms’, Journal of Economic Geography 6 (4), pp. 517–540. DOI: 10.1093/jeg/lbi023 One of the best empirical applications so far of distanciated learning in relational spaces as outlined theoretically by Amin and Cohendet (2004). Faulconbridge uses research on professional networks in advertising firms to highlight the forms of interpersonal communication involved in the ‘global stretching of learning’, and the corporate knowledge‐management strategies that support these. 6. Coe, N. M. and Bunnell, T. G. (2003), ‘“Spatializing” knowledge communities: towards a conceptualization of transnational innovation networks’, Global Networks 3 (4), pp. 437–456. DOI: 10.1111/1471-0374.00071 Coe and Bunnell provide a useful literature review of different concepts that are based on a knowledge community metaphor, and effectively summarise the distinctive insights offered by each. In the resulting discussion, they identify the presence of types of transnational innovation network other than those formed by large corporations, and particularly emphasise the agency of migrants and internationally mobile individuals in circulating embodied forms of tacit knowledge. 7. Gertler, M. S. (2008), ‘Buzz without being there? Communities of practice in context’. In Amin, A. and Roberts, J. (eds), Community, Economic Creativity, and Organization. (Oxford University Press, Oxford). This is a more balanced appraisal of the relational proximity/communities of practice debate in economic geography than previous critiques by sceptics of the argument. Gertler examines the conditions under which communities of practice may create the social affinities that enable knowledge transfer over distance. From reviewing the findings of previous research studies in this area, he concludes that the potential for extra‐local learning will vary between economic sectors dependent on the type of knowledge that underpins innovation in that production context. 8. Grabher, G. (2004), ‘Learning in projects, remembering in networks? Communality, sociality, and connectivity in project ecologies’, European Urban and Regional Studies 11 (2), pp. 103–123. DOI: 10.1177/0969776404041417 This is the paper in which the full implications of Grabher’s analysis of project forms of organisation for the study of learning are developed. He uses research on the contrasting learning logics in advertising and software project ecologies to identify the diverse modes of social and communicative relations that are dominant in each of these settings. The paper is also notable in that it employs a relational understanding of space without privileging either the local or global scales: the different forms of learning practice discussed are seen to be a product of network relations of varying length and duration

Economic geography · Geography · Sociology · Regional Development and Policy

• Spaces of lobbying

  Open Access•Annelore Hofman, Manuel B Aalbers•Geography Compass•2017

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