Networking,context and firm-level innovation: Cooperation through the regional filter in Norway

The paper assesses the role for innovation of one aspect which has been generally overlooked by evolutionary economic geography: context. It analyses how context shapes the impact of collaboration on firm-level innovation for 1604 firms located in the five largest city regions of Norway. Specifically, the analysis shows how the benefits to firms of collaborating within regional, national, and international innovation networks are affected by the knowledge endowments of the region within which the firm is located. Using a logit regression analysis, we find, first, that only national and international networking have a significant positive impact on the likelihood of innovation (the former only for process innovation), whereas the regional knowledge endowments have no direct effect. Second, regional cooperation is particularly effective in regions with high investments in R&D, whereas international cooperation is important in regions with an educated workforce – and regional and national collaboration may be ineffective in such cases. We conclude that, in the case of Norway, context is essential in determining the capacity of firms to set up networks and innovate. Regions with an educated workforce can use the resulting absorptive capacity to successfully assimilate knowledge being diffused through global pipelines from faraway places. However, this absorptive capacity is likely to be heavily filtered if regional firms mainly rely on internal connections within Norway.     

Windfalls for whom? The evolving notion of ‘community’ in community benefit provisions from wind farms

This paper investigates the increasing provision of ‘community benefits’ – i.e. financial or material benefits to communities affected by wind energy development – with a focus on on-shore wind projects in Wales. The paper argues that as community benefits are becoming more significant in scale, so pressures are mounting on what have hitherto been largely ad hoc arrangements for their disbursement. The paper finds that previously dominant definitions of communities as places directly affected by and within close proximity to wind farm development, are being challenged by the tendency to define ‘affected’ communities as broader entities characterised by more indirect and widely dispersed claims to benefit entitlement. This redefinition of the recipient community is causing conflict, much of it focused on debates about how community benefits should be governed. Evidence suggests that any re-scaling of relations around community benefits – from local compensation towards wider development goals – may be more consensually achieved in communities with previous experience in handling these funds, and where growing income streams allow multiple constituencies to be satisfied.     

Is geographical proximity necessary in the innovation networks in the era of global economy?

In the analysis of geographical spillovers, a commonly accepted hypothesis is that the different actors of innovation need to be physically closed to one another because the transfer of tacit knowledge implies frequent face-to-face relations. This hypothesis is put under closer examination in this paper. The first section analyses the need for economic agents to be closely located to develop research and innovative activities, starting with the analysis of their need for co-ordination and using some case studies. Based on the example of three French regions, the second section examines the importance given by the local development policies to geographical proximity in order to support the rapid development of local networks favouring innovation. In both sections, nonlocal relations appear as a key factor to develop innovation. As a conclusion, nonlocal relations should be encouraged by local development policies in the same way as local relations.     

Logistic innovation in global supply chains: an empirical test of dynamic transaction-cost theory

Upgrading logistic services in the context of international supply chains is not a smooth process. Upgrading may require the development of co-operative relationships, or alliances, involving large logistic service firms and their customers: multinational enterprises. Both sides may be unwilling and/or unable to engage in upgrading strategies in an alliance context. Fourth-party logistics is an example of a logistic product innovation entailing research-based advice as well as the design and implementation of new supply-chain solutions. It has the potential of stimulating spatial shift in global production networks and regional distribution systems (Visser and Lambooy, Geographisches Zeitschrift 92(heft 1+2):5–20, 2005). Using dynamic transaction-cost theory (Nooteboom, Learning and innovation in organisations and economies, 2000), this paper theoretically specifies and empirically measures three risks associated with the development of fourth-party logistics: dependence, unwanted spillovers, and conservatism. Case-study evidence reveals that dynamic transaction-cost theory partially explains the slow development of new logistic services in an alliance setting. Some aspects of conservatism are found to be relevant, along with risks of dependence due to specific investments in human resources and information systems. Other, not predicted but important factors, however, are the lack of credibility of service innovation by asset-based logistic firms, and strategic considerations of customers regarding logistic organization and control. The first factor implies that firms specializing in fourth-party services are likely to remain (very) limited in number. The second factor implies that this type of service provision is more likely to develop in dynamic port clusters, as customers prefer to tap into a variety of ideas from many different suppliers. In local clusters, interactions between firms can be relatively frequent, casual, short-lived and open, so that the structure of local networks is relatively decentralized, dense and flexible. This stimulates (logistic) innovation (Nooteboom, in Hanusch and Pyka (eds.) Elgar companion to neo Schumpeterian economics, 2006). In global supply chains, interactions between logistic service firms and their customers tend to have the opposite characteristics, which do not stimulate innovation.     

Welcome to the Gig Economy: neoliberal industrial relations and the case of Uber

The competitive pressures of neoliberal economies have compelled employers to devolve responsibilities to contractors and subcontractors. The rise information technology platforms have significantly accelerated this trend over past decade. “Sharing economy” companies have such widespread adoption of neoliberalism’s industrial relations that a new moniker—“the Gig Economy”—has taken root. Although shareholders and consumers have benefited, middle-class jobs have been squeezed in the process. This paper uses Uber as a case study to discuss how Sharing Economy entities are merely the latest iteration of companies to enact the neoliberal playbook, including (a) (mis)classifying workers, (b) engaging in regime shopping, and (c) employing the most economically vulnerable, rather than giving rise to a new world of work altogether. The result is a crowding out of middle-class employment by precarious ‘gigs’ that lack legal protections and benefits.     

Birds as lines: The production of alternative regimes of environmental management in the aftermath of a toxic disaster

This paper analyses how in the aftermath of one of the worst environmental disasters ever to occur in Spain – the Aznalcóllar Disaster – various environmentalist and conservationist groups mobilised migratory birds to bring new insights and the need for new precautions to the controversy elicited by the spill. The case study, thus, revolves around how environmentalists established a “hybrid collective action” to draw attention to unconsidered risks and impacts of the disaster and thereby make the case for open debate. Building upon this, I engage with two different, though interrelated, theoretical debates that contribute to a rethinking of environmental management (EM) as a social and materially situated practice. Drawing on the idea of “tactic” (De Certeau, 1984), I draw attention to the devices, actions and procedures that environmentalists carried out to resist attempts to minimise the spill and to undermine administrations’ assumptions of control, coherence and singularity associated the idea of management. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s latest work (2007, 2008, 2011), I analyse environmentalists’ most successful tactic: the enactment of migratory birds as “lines”. Together with other authors in this special issue, I will use this notion to make an argument against some of the assumptions of the “hybrid ontology”. In contrast to more essentialists and static notions of non-human agency and politics, the idea of line is particularly useful as a way of understanding how nature(s) can be effectuated differently and how this leads to the imagining of new regimes of cohabitation, human and non-human management and intervention.     

Fragmenting regimes: how water quality regulation is changing political-economic landscapes

Conflicts over water quality regulation are entering local economic development policy and re-shaping political-economic landscapes. Across the United States, decentralizing scales of regulation, scientific uncertainty, and increasing citizen participation are creating new regulatory contexts. Using regime and regulation theory, I address how regulation of the environment is altering economic regimes and creating new alliances among stakeholders. The research shows the dominant regime in the state of Ohio, a pro-growth stakeholder coalition between point source businesses (including electric utilities and municipal sewage treatment plants) and real estate development interests, is fragmenting. At the same time, there is a policy coalition emerging between environmentalists and government staff that is advocating for nonpoint source water pollution regulation. These emergent coalitions exemplify the changing nature of environmental regulation and economic regimes.     

Growth and change and the innovative firm

Regional economic development is largely influenced by technical progress, and innovative manufacturing firms are important in this context. Large, fast growing, innovative firms contribute significantly to growth by direct and indirect employment and income-generating impacts, and these are likely to be extended through time if the firms are capable of developing new product lines and markets. Unfortunately, ‘orthodox’ theories of the firm provide a poor basis for understanding ‘how’ and ‘why’ innovative firms come into existence, grow, change, and operate over time and geographic space. Behavioral—managerial notions, on the other hand, do appear to provide a useful basis for conceptualization. This paper examines some of these concepts and goes on to provide a framework for understanding growth and change in innovative, multiproduct, multiregional firms.     

Mobilizing research on Africa's development corridors

Across Africa, development corridors – networks of roads, railways, pipelines and ports that facilitate the movement of commodities between landlocked production areas, processing zones and global markets – are being built at an unprecedented pace. In mainstream development discourse, these mega-infrastructure projects have been framed as an effective way of creating conditions that are attractive to investors while simultaneously driving inclusive economic growth and development. Yet, recent geographic research on new development corridors has revealed certain tensions and inconsistencies in this win–win narrative, drawing attention to cases where the spatial reorganization of land that has accompanied corridor development has introduced new patterns of spatial exclusion and immobility. This article shows how approaching the study of development corridors using the new mobility paradigm – paying attention to uneven and conflicting mobilities along new corridor routes – stands to generate important empirical and theoretical insights about peoples' lived experiences with corridors, as well as about the trajectories of power enacted through corridor development. Ultimately, it is argued that applying the new mobilities paradigm in future research on development corridors may help researchers to better understand emergent forms of spatial exclusion and immobility created by new corridors.     

Getting international labour rights right at a foreign controlled company in Malaysia: A Global Labour Network perspective

The article addresses international campaigning for labour rights and global labour networking against illegitimate labour practices of global corporations. Theoretically, the article offers an analytical framework to explain and strategise labour empowerment and disempowerment in Global Production Networks. The problem is approached by reviewing how the issue of labour agency is addressed in literature about Global Value Chains, Global Production Networks and Labour Geography. Given the limited progress in theorising cross-border labour agency, two new approaches within the industrial relations research tradition – Strategic Union Corporate Analysis and Strategic Choice Framework – are linked to economic geography perspectives, with a view to offering a more integrated Global Labour Network (GLN) approach. The framework is then applied to analyse and explain the outcome and impact of a Danish–Malaysian campaign in support of a worker collective in a Danish controlled joint venture in Malaysia struggling for union recognition and collective bargaining agreement. The article concludes that the GLN approach integrates the achievements of the labour agency literatures by focusing on explaining changes in strategic labour power from the dynamic interface of strategic opportunities and labour capacity. Moreover, it is argued that semi-comprehensive international campaigns of labour NGOs may add critical but insufficient support to labour agency in developing countries with highly legalistic and politically infused industrial relations systems. Finally, international labour NGO networks will not be sustainable if they are not integrated with and supported by national and global union networks that match the power of global corporate networks.     

Locating international REDD+ power relations: Debating forests and trees in international climate negotiations

The Reduction of Deforestation and Forest Degradation initiative (REDD+) was initially hailed widely as a smart and cost-effective way to mitigate climate change and has moved quickly compared to other strands of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. Much of the initiative’s original appeal – and a good deal of subsequent controversy around it – relates to framing the world’s tropical forests as carbon sinks and compensating developing countries that manage to reverse or avoid deforestation. REDD+ negotiations can thus be seen a site where the standard divisions between Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 (‘developed’ and ‘developing’) were being challenged and interrogated by the negotiating parties and the broader network of actors around the climate regime. This article suggests that such complex and changing global governance policy fields need to be analysed as ‘places’ in their own right, populated by actors engaged in field-specific power relations that may not reflect international hierarchies or power relations manifested in other international settings. Based in a unique set of interviews supplemented by primary data analysis, this article unpacks the power relations of REDD+ negotiations by examining how those involved seek to assume competence, designate and recognize leadership, and shape outcomes. In tracing the dynamics of claiming competence, the ‘competition’ between two disciplinary milieus around forests as an international policy object and also delegates’ shifting between reliance on expert knowledge and political ‘know-how’ in the negotiations themselves are identified. To understand the politics of recognition – that is to have a claim to competence or position acknowledged by others – the perceived qualities and resources of recognized leadership are examined and the absence of global superpowers amongst REDD+ leadership is problematized and discussed. Finally, in terms of wielding influence over outcomes, the fate of two quite similar ideas – one that has become incorporated into REDD+ methodology and another that is failing to be – further illustrate how the field is marked by internal power practices and that not all actors are equally well-positioned to achieve desired outcomes.     

Revisiting the red light district: Still neglected, immoral and marginal?

Twenty years ago, Ashworth et al. (1988) offered a distinctive and innovative interpretation of a neglected aspect of the urban scene: the red light district. Focusing on the location of female prostitution in a series of Western European cities, their paper suggested that the geographies of sex work are revealing of some of the ‘less obvious’ social and political processes that shape urban space. Here, we revisit Ashworth et al’s paper in the light of subsequent developments in the organisation of commercial sex as well as the study of sexuality and space. Noting important continuities as well as major shifts in the location of sex work, with a significant shift to off-street forms of sex working having occurred, this paper argues that some of the ideas in Ashworth et al’s paper remain highly pertinent, but others appear in need of updating. In particular, we stress the importance of focusing on men as both clients and workers within the sex industry, and flag up a number of connections that might be made with the emerging literatures on the geographies of sex itself. We hence conclude by considering Ashworth et al’s paper as an important early intervention in debates surrounding the relations of sexuality and space, albeit one in which questions of gender, embodiment, and sexual desire remained largely unexplored.     

An assessment of women’s access to natural resources through communal projects in South Africa

With the passing of the apartheid regime and its multi-faceted mechanisms of exclusion, women in rural South Africa have begun expanding their access to natural resources for livelihood enhancement. One of the ways this has occurred is through community-based organizations that focus on local production as a mechanism to transform natural resources into material goods. While this practice is nearly ubiquitous throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the apartheid regime was particularly effective in limiting access to natural resources, a phenomenon reversed by the current democratic government. In this paper, we assess the impact of organizational design on women’s livelihood systems as a means of alleviating rural poverty. We surveyed women on both more formal, or bureaucratic, organizations and more informal, or socially-embedded, organizations. After locating the discussion in the relevant gender, environment, and livelihoods literatures, we employ four concepts, organizational context, environmental entitlement, livelihood systems, and gender and power relations to assess the impact of organizational design on livelihood enhancement. Having found that women derived no significant material benefit from participation in either type of organization, we conclude that women are straddling two processes, neo-liberalization and neo-traditionalism, that impact gender and power relations. This situation has left women in vulnerable positions within their organizations and with little livelihood enhancement.     

Constructing legitimacy in post-war transition: The return of ‘normal’ politics in Nepal and Sri Lanka?

Bringing together ethnographic evidence from mid-Western Nepal and eastern Sri Lanka, this article explores how political legitimacy is constructed and contested in post-war environments. We posit that in the post-war context there are important changes in the kinds of politics, agenda-setting, players and tactics that are considered acceptable and those that are rendered transgressive, threats to order and stability, or otherwise placed ‘out of bounds’. The art of crafting political legitimacy is defined in sharp contrast to the immediate history of armed conflict. The end of the war and the resumption of supposedly democratic politics thus mark a shift in what is seen as legitimate or normal politics. This shift constrains certain kinds of actors, tactics, and registers and it amplifies others, while being itself a result of political work. We argue that a reduction of the space for dissent, and an increase of the space for politicking are complementary aspects of the redefinition of what constitutes legitimate politics in the post-war context. These adverse political effects are not simply problems of context – post-war environments being non-conducive to democracy – but rather expose the more fundamental fallibilities and contradictions of demarcating a legitimate sphere of democratic politics in particularly visible and precarious ways.     

Strategies and tactics for local market making in the Temporary Staffing Industry

This paper examines the increasing complexity of interactions between temporary staffing agencies and their client firms within the local labour market of Birmingham, UK. Temporary Staffing Agencies have been identified as active and influential agents in local, national and international labour markets. Their influence on local labour market functioning, national labour regulation and international regulatory frameworks is growing. Existing literature demonstrates the power of large multinational temporary staffing agencies in both established and emerging temporary staffing markets. Such analyses also contend that multinational agencies operate in very different ways to smaller independent ‘back-street’ temporary staffing agencies, with different types of clients and at different ends of the market. However, the research conducted in Birmingham, UK suggests that the reality is more complex. It is argued that there can be more subtle and intricate nuances of relevance to the temporary staffing industry in respect of the relationships that exist between large and small temporary staffing agencies, as well as between such agencies and their clients. We highlight how smaller agencies in Birmingham are utilising a variety of strategies and tactics to creatively ‘bolt-on’ to more formalised national agreements established by multinational agencies with their clients. Moreover, smaller agencies – in some instances – are able to exploit their knowledge of local labour markets to subvert, sabotage and/or infiltrate the activities of multinational agencies in increasingly astute ways. In turn, this generates a series of questions for understanding the nature of ‘market making’ associated with the temporary staffing industry more broadly.     

How “Water for All!” policy became hegemonic: The power of the World Bank and its transnational policy networks

As recently as 1990, few people in the global South received their water from US or European water firms. But just 10 years later, more than 400 million people did, with that number predicted to increase to 1.2 billion people by 2015, transforming water in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into capitalized markets as precious, and war-provoking, as oil. This article explains how this new global water policy became constituted so quickly, dispersed so widely, with such profound institutional effects. It highlights the prominent role of transnational policy networks in linking environment and development NGOs and the so-called global water policy experts with Northern high-end service sectors, and the ways in which the World Bank facilitates their growth, authority, and efficacy. This phenomenon reflects the World Bank’s latest and perhaps most vulnerable development regime, which I call “green neoliberalism.”     

The realm of freedom in new rural governance: Micro-politics of democracy in Sweden

Voluntary associations are at the heart of Swedish rural policy and strategies for governance as partners in bringing about ‘development from below.’ Examining the implications of this new responsibility being placed on the civil society in new modes of multilevel governance, I ask: do these changes presage greater political space for individuals vis à vis the state or is Swedish rural policy premised on ideas about an institutional context that might be disappearing? In comparative research in rural Sweden, I discuss state and civil-society relations at the macro level in light of the gendered micro-politics of associational life on the ground. Through ethnographic research with people involved in development work of different kinds, I examine how ideas about community associations are used to mobilize rural policy. I analyze its’ political implications and argue for the importance of analyzing macro in relation to the micropolitics on the ground for a better theoretical understanding of democracy and power in rural governance, in particular its gendered implications. I argue that past collaborative relations between the civil society and the state’s administrative apparatuses as well as the current focus of rural policy have enabled the state to hand over service functions to the civil society and diluted their ‘voice,’ incongrously endangering the institutional basis of rural policy itself. Further, attention to the gendered micropolitics of associational life makes apparent cleavages within civil society and its underlying relations of gender and power that challenge current conceptualizations on the neoliberalization of rural policy.     

Collaboration in industry: Empirical findings among small electronics manufacturing firms in the Greater Toronto Area

According to many researchers, the use of inter-firm collaborative practices as a new industrial production strategy is increasing as a response to industrial restructuring and changing environmental conditions. The adoption of these practices is thought to be particularly critical for small firms, and consequently governments in most industrialized countries have designed specific policies aimed at encouraging inter-firm relationships. The few empirical studies have focused on the experiences of model industrial districts to support claims about the ubiquity of collaborative relations. The present study of a more typical urban area examines three interrelated issues: the incidence of inter-firm relations, the motivations and forms of collaboration, and the influence of public policies on inter-firm relationships. Information was collected from 191 small electronics firms in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The results suggest that inter-firm collaboration is moderately common but not the norm. The incidence of collaborative activities is likely to increase with company size. While motives for inter-firm activities vary slightly with firm size, the nature and forms of agreements are largely similar among various sizes of firms. The paper notes that public policies and programs within the GTA have not had the desired impact of creating cooperative attitudes among small electronics firms. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Crowdsourcing for forensic disaster investigations: Hurricane Harvey case study

A critical prerequisite of risk prevention measures for natural hazards is from the results of forensic disaster investigations (FDIs). The current studies of the FDIs are limited by data issues including data availability and data reliability. The applications of crowdsourcing method in natural disasters indicate the potential to provide data support for the FDIs. However, there is very limited existing research on the use of crowdsourcing data for the FDIs. Following the requirements published by the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk program for FDIs, this paper establishes the process map for conducting the FDIs by scenario analysis approach with the crowdsourcing and crowdsensor data. Hurricane Harvey is used as the case study to implement the process map. The results show that the use of crowdsourcing data for the FDIs is feasible. Though this paper takes practical measures for improving the reliability of crowdsourcing data (i.e., little data size) in the case study, future research can focus on the development of advanced algorithm for the crowdsourcing data quality validation.