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.     

The governance and evolution of local production networks in a cluster: the case of Taiwan’s machine tool industry

The competitive advantages of spatially concentrated and networked production systems, in terms of flexibility and adaptivity, have been well documented. This paper contributes to this literature by improving our understanding regarding the underlying mechanisms behind the governance and evolution of such a production system. By using the case of Taiwan’s machine tool (MT) industry, this paper demonstrates how lead firms depend on their relational capabilities or relation-building skills, nurtured greatly by cluster embeddedness, to effectively govern their suppliers in the production networks. While the production systems constantly evolve, this paper also discusses the ongoing reconfiguration of Taiwan’s MT production networks stimulated by lead firms’ efforts to tackle the cluster’s emerging diseconomies so as to sustain their competitiveness. This paper concludes that a cure to deal with the cluster’s diseconomies would be the reinforcement of industrial clustering.     

The rise of venture capital centres in China: A spatial and network analysis

Due to the importance of venture capital (VC) firms in spurring regional economic growth, the geography of VC firms and VC investments have attracted a lot of attention. However, the spatial patterns of cross-regional VC flows have rarely been explored, particularly in the context of emerging economies. Drawing on a unique dataset on VC firms and investments related to domestic initial public offerings (IPOs), this study combines location analysis with network analysis to investigate the spatial patterns of VC activities in China. The results confirm that Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai are the leading VC centres in the country. Although Yangtze Delta Area hosts the largest number of investments, Beijing and Shenzhen have a considerable advantage over Shanghai in terms of the number of VC firms, investments, and the number of domestic VC-backed IPOs. Beijing and Shenzhen also appear more central than Shanghai in China’s VC networks, with Beijing-Shenzhen representing the most important city-dyad in terms of VC investment flows. The article explains how the dynamics of the VC centres is embedded in China’s institutional and cultural context, critical to understanding the evolution and geography of China’s VC industry.     

Open innovation and its discontents

This paper critically synthesizes empirics and issues in discrete inter-disciplinary literatures to identify ‘open innovation’ as part of an emergent regime of accumulation, overlaying and co-existing with flexible production, and encompassing novel firm-level strategies, new forms of corporate networks, and a disturbing capital-labor relation that informalizes innovative work while cultivating entrepreneurial but self-exploiting subjects. I explain the novelty of open innovation, its genealogy, and the implications for people and conditions of work as much as for firms in a new topology of power relations. I cast the ensemble of strategies and tactics encompassed in open innovation as contingent, continually unfolding, and sometimes chaotic if not destructive for both firms and labor, in contrast to the celebratory tone in the business as well as geography and regional studies literatures regarding its benefits for competitiveness, innovativeness, value capture, and development. Open innovation – the externalization of innovation – entails long-run approaches to innovation and investment that are fraught with problems, prompting the development of short-term tactics to engage the challenges. One short-run strategy, crowdsourcing, bypasses the conventional web of inter-firm relations to connect digitally with individuals of the global crowd, enabling firms to reap the benefits of the crowd’s innovative talents, often without remuneration under circumstances that institutionalize informal work. These neoliberal subjects are best understood in terms of multiple subjectivities. I close by connecting the crowdsourcing of innovative with non-innovative work, both of which are parts of the emergent regime associated with new hiring and work practices that usher in new modes of exploitation.     

Trans-scalar embeddedness and governance deficits in global production networks: Crisis in South African fruit

The governance of labour in global production networks (GPNs) has become a critical area of concern amongst academics and policymakers alike. To date, GPN research has focused on the role of private company codes and multi-stakeholder ethical initiatives primarily driven by lead-firms. Other GPN studies highlight the critical role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in challenging lead-firm purchasing practices and shaping regulatory outcomes at local production sites. However, GPN research has not sufficiently incorporated the role of nation states in regulating work through legislative frameworks and enforcement regimes, often referred to in the literature as ‘state’ or ‘public’ governance. This is despite a ‘regulatory renaissance’ taking place across certain developing countries, seeking to strengthen their national regulatory labour institutions (Piore and Schrank, 2008:1).The GPN framework provides an analytical lens through which to conceptualise cross-cutting strands of trans-scalar governance regimes, involving complex networks of state, private and civil society actors operating at multiple scales. Notions of territorial and societal embeddedness are used to elucidate how global ethical standards derived from particular country contexts become enmeshed in national regulatory frameworks and local societal relations, shaping governance outcomes for precarious workers incorporated into GPNs. The paper draws attention to the ‘trans-scalar embeddedness’ of labour governance regimes which interact across geographical scales and, in the case of South African fruit, reflect a ‘trans-scalar governance deficit’ for precarious workers. It is argued that the influence of national regulatory regimes should be more fully incorporated into analytical frameworks for understanding governance outcomes in GPNs.     

The organizational paradox in advertising and the reconfiguration of project cooperation

In recent literature, projects are mostly seen as an efficient form of organization which is particularly suited for mastering tasks of high complexity and creativity and adapting to changing economic and institutional conditions. This paper challenges the assumption that inter-firm projects are persistent organizational arrangements of production in the advertising industry and presents a novel argument about the potential threats to forms of project organization in crisis situations. By exploring the cases of Frankfurt/Main and Leipzig (East Germany), we show that the organization of production is substantially affected by periods of economic crisis or political transformation. We demonstrate that inter-firm projects might be replaced by more durable organizational configurations or might not be viewed as viable options in situations of severe rupture. This applies particularly to the cooperative arrangements in the creative process and leads to an organizational paradox. Although creativity is often a pivotal force to gain competitive advantage, the advertising agencies respond to the challenges of crises by reducing cooperation with external partners to a minimum and sometimes fully rely on in-house personnel. This threatens the potential of the respective firms to develop innovative and creative ideas which would enable the firms to acquire new customers and market segments. Instead of trying to overcome crises by focusing on their creative capabilities, many advertising agencies develop a cost-cutting strategy and rely on more durable network-forms of organization instead of inter-firm projects.     

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.     

Global production networks in the passenger aviation industry

Although the number of directions which geographical research on transport is taking has recently increased, the extent to which transport geography capitalises on theoretical advancements made in other sub-disciplines of human geography is still fairly limited. This especially pertains to economic geography which, in contrast to the predominantly positivist and quantitative transport geography, has developed over the last few decades a more post-positivist and qualitative profile. By means of focusing on passenger air transport – one of the most neglected industries in economic geography – this paper aims to help bridge this gap. Three under-researched aspects of air transport are identified and a combination of two economic-geographical approaches – global production networks (GPN) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) – is advocated as a useful conceptual basis for further, more qualitative and more critical research on this dynamic sector. The paper argues that GPN and EEG would help research on air transport to: (1) employ network thinking beyond the infrastructural understanding of networks of air connections and thus better explain the multi-actor nature of the aviation sector, (2) complement the research on supra-national and national regulatory frameworks with more attention to the array of sub-national environments that shape the aviation industry ‘from below’, and (3) explore how the relations between aviation and economic development are moulded by different place-specific institutional factors. To lay foundations under further research the paper conceptualises the aviation industry as a global production network and uses the example of Polish passenger air transport to highlight the paper’s key empirical implications.     

‘Imagineering’ Asian emerging markets: Financial knowledge networks in the fund management industry

This paper examines knowledge production networks in the fund management industry. Focusing on Asian emerging markets (EMs), I explore how fund managers, brokers and research analysts utilise a combination of texts, analytical structures, codified procedures, and social networks to generate interpretations and perspectives on Asian EMs. Utilising a process-based approach, I investigate how ‘EMs’ as an investment category is imagined and practiced by those in the fund management industry through knowledge networks and how such networks are produced and maintained. Discussions are drawn from interviews conducted with 22 EMs specialists in Singapore and London. I argue that Asian EMs have distinct characteristics that are acted upon and reproduced by finance workers in particular ways and that the acquisition and transfer of tacit knowledge takes on increased significance when codified knowledge structures are lacking. Actors in Singapore and London are also embedded in different knowledge networks, which offer different strategic advantages but, when taken together, form a complex and multi-layered knowledge production network of ‘imagineering’ Asian EMs from both within and outside of Asia.     

Knowledge,influence, and firm-level change: A geographic analysis of board membership associated with Canada’s growing and declining businesses

Clarification of the factors that drive business expansion and contraction is among the most important topics that can be addressed by research in economic geography and related disciplines. This study analyzes the development of Canadian business by examining the connection between firm-level growth and decline and elite knowledge and influence connections that Canadian businesses use to link themselves to other corporations and cities nationally and globally. The research focuses on the inter-firm and inter-city linkages embodied in the boards of directors of Canada’s leading corporations. Corporate directorships have an important geographic dimension, as firms invite people from a variety of places and backgrounds to serve on their boards. This study finds that board member selection practices among Canadian firms can be linked directly to business growth and decline. Benchmarking board composition against firm expansion and decline in terms of inflation-adjusted annual revenue change over the 1991–2006 period, this study shows that growing Canadian firms are associated with directors from a much broader range of national and international cities than firms that experienced decline over the same period. Firm growth in Canada thus appears to be related to boards encompassing diverse members from national and international locations, while firm decline appears to be associated with boards including more local and regional members. The conclusion interprets the implications of board member diversity and suggests that broadly-based boards can play a role in encouraging firm growth through access to elite knowledge and influence networks.     

全球钛资源行业发展现状

钛矿是我国对外依存度较高的矿种之一,对我国战略性新兴产业的发展起着重要的支撑作用,对全球钛矿行业的发展现状进行分析与研究,能够为我国钛矿资源安全提供重要研究依据.本文对全球钛资源的储量及分布状况、钛资源的生产和消费情况进行了分析.分析结果显示,我国是钛资源大国,钛储量位居世界第一;但多为共伴生矿,品位不高.钛精矿进口量...     

The contribution of leading firms in environmental sustainability: dampening the detrimental effect of political capital ties

As a possible determinant of environmental sustainability, innovation management has grasped the attention of researchers. In the present research, we investigated the effect of political capital ties on firm’s contribution to environmental sustainability. We also examined how observed government support, an indicator of the inherent dependencies among political capital ties, moderates the effects of changes on innovation performance which plays a mediating role in the relationship of political capital ties and firm’s contribution in environmental sustainability. We got empirical data of 4807 listed firms of China (2010–2015) and diffused political capital ties to form a two-dimensional matrix on analysis of 36 interviews. Our study suggests that political capital dampens inputs for innovation resulting in a proliferation of innovation performance. This paper also guides that how moderation of enabling the effect of political capital ties is explained and measured through important dimensions of project initiation, high-tech accreditation and government subsidies in the context of government support.The present study also sheds light on new ways in which upper echelons theory, transaction cost and resource dependence theory can be integrated for more advanced research on political capital ties to evolve an optimal corporate strategy for environmental sustainability.     

东北地区煤炭可持续发展研究方法

在中央振兴东北老工业基地总体战略部署的新形势下,对东北地区煤炭工业基地的可持续发展与国民经济建设保证程度进行客观、深入的分析研究,是非常必要的。根据东北地区煤炭工业现状,对东北地区煤炭资源保证程度、煤炭工业区生态环境、地质灾害、区域经济等有关战略问题的影响因子进行论证与分析;并依据指标体系建立原则,结合煤炭城市特点,将13个评价因子25个评价指标引入煤炭工业区可持续发展评价体系;基于GIS数字化管理技术,以资源一环境一经济发展为主线建立影响因子融合模型,在定量分析与空间分析基础上,提出了利用产生式原则构建专家系统以表达专业领域知识和专业问题的解决方案。     

Moving players,traversing perspectives: Global value chains,production networks and Ghanaian football labour migration

This article examines the production and transnational export of Ghanaian football labour. It does so via a cross-disciplinary approach that utilises perspectives rooted in the sociology of development (global value chains) and economic geography (global production networks). The article is underpinned by two central arguments. Firstly, it contends that the GVC framework is useful in accounting for how Ghanaian players are produced and prepared for the international market, identifying the key agents and agencies involved, mapping the geography of production and export and assessing the institutional context within which the trade operates locally, nationally and internationally. The second draws on the GPN perspective to argue that while Ghanaian football labour migration remains a process contoured by uneven asymmetries of power that favour actors, stakeholders and entities in the global North, there are currently segments of the production–export chain where power is much more diffuse and some benefits are captured in the global South. The paper draws on interview data and observations gleaned from four periods of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana between January 2008 and June 2011.     

The evolution of the electronics industry in Johor (Malaysia): Strategic coupling,adaptiveness, adaptation,and the role of agency

Bringing together concepts from the global production networks and evolutionary economic geography literature, this article empirically examines the trajectory of the electrical and electronics industry in Johor (Malaysia). Based on trends in firm entries and exit as well as interviews with companies, we find limited robustness in the industry’s trajectory. While there is evidence of the role of ‘structure’ in this outcome, we argue that human agency – particularly the actions of subnational policy-makers – is key. This is manifest in a preference for fostering regional ‘adaptiveness’ through the often uncritical promotion of a diversity of economic sectors. This compromises the meaningful pursuit of regional ‘adaptation’ in the form of new and more complex branches emerging from existing industries. This arrested development, in turn, hinders an effective strategic coupling between the regional economy and multinational corporations, thus undermining regional resilience.     

Relational networks of knowledge production in transnational law firms

For geographers, debates surrounding the knowledge economy have reinvigorated interest in the geographies of learning and knowledge production. Particularly topical are discussions of the possibility of spatially stretched (global) learning, something especially relevant to professional service firms where the production and management of knowledge across transnational organizational networks is essential. Taking this as its starting point, the paper explores the way knowledge is produced and circulated in transnational legal professional service firms. Drawing on the ideas of relational economic geography to analyse original empirical material, it highlights the way relational networks are socially constructed to allow learning to be stretched across space. The paper then goes on to identify the ‘politics’ of inclusion in these networks and the exclusivity of membership. It also highlights the geographies of power that influence the nature and effect of the knowledge produced and circulated. It does this by examining the role of relational knowledge networks in the ‘Americanization’ of legal practice in Europe and the impacts of such changes on national institutional and regulatory contexts. It is, therefore, argued that transnational corporate networks need to be viewed as heterogeneous and ‘embedded spaces of social practice’. It is shown that studying the actors and their interactions across relational networks is vital to fully understand how global relational forms are constructed and to understand their structuring effects on the global economy.     

Greening as strategic development in industrial change - Why companies participate in eco-networks

Networking between companies and other regional key actors has grown into a widespread instrument for economic development since the 1990s. Participatory networks have formed the concept for many activities of Local Agenda 21. Simultaneously, economic geography has focused on network theories to explain innovation in and the economic success of regions.This article focuses on the reasons why individual actors participate in environmentally oriented information networks. The questions approached are: Does the concept of learning within networks influence a firm’s development? How do the participants interact with each other? What effects do the networks have on their environment (arenas)?The changing arenas of a firm are analysed with regard to environmental concerns. These changes need to be anticipated for reliable strategies. To gain information and knowledge about current behaviour and activities, the functions of networks as learning platforms are discussed. Drawing upon arguments from different network theories, the motivations of participating in a network are threefold: actor and firm oriented, network internal (inter-firm), and network external. From these, a generic target cube of network motivations and actions is set up.The concept is reviewed by examining 12 ‘regional environmental information-oriented corporation networks’ (RUN) in the Greater Munich Area. The empirical material reveals that this type of network does not provide a guarantee for significant improvements in a firm’s environmental behaviour. However, participants learn about best practices while pursuing explicit or implicit aims as to influence their arenas.     

中国重要金属矿产资源现状、供需、进出口数据集

金属矿产是经济社会发展的物质基础。本数据集采集了16种对国民经济发展有重要影响的大宗紧缺矿产（铁、锰、铜、铝、金、铅、锌、镍、铬）、优势矿产（钨、钼、锡、锑）及战略新兴矿产（锂、钴、钛）2006—2017年的世界及中国资源储量、原矿产量、消费量、贸易量及贸易金额等数据。数据集为Excel表格型数据,包含6个sheet表（世界资源量、中国查明资源储量、中国基础储量、中国原矿产量、中国原矿消费量、中国进出口量）,旨在分析研究我国在工业化进程中后期阶段所需重要金属矿产的资源现状和供需趋势。数据集显示：①我国大宗紧缺矿产如铁、锰、铜、金等查明资源储量虽稳步增长,但开采消耗量大,使得基础储量增速缓慢;未来需求总量仍将维持高位,国内保障程度不足,进口量持续攀升。优势矿产资源钨、锑储采比低,后备资源接替不足,优势程度下降;②战略新兴矿产锂、钴、钛资源量、基础储量增长缓慢或呈下降态势,国内资源品质较差,难利用资源多;产量、消费量近十年快速增长,且未来将持续高增长,国内资源储量增长缓慢,供需矛盾凸显。该数据集对已有金属矿产供需数据的收集和总结,为今后金属矿产勘查及战略部署提供参考。     

Divergent growth trajectories in China’s chemical industry: the case of the newly developed industrial parks in Shanghai,Nanjing and Ningbo

In the late 1990’s, the “new-economy” industries in China proved to be relatively vulnerable and were strongly hit by the financial crisis in Asia. As a result, a new economic support policy was introduced in China’s Yangtze Delta region, which put greater emphasis on the support of traditional industrial sectors, including the chemical industry. This paper investigates the effects of the growth of this industry, as well as the potential and current problems emerging from new growth paths. It compares the growth of three newly developed chemical industry parks in Shanghai, Nanjing and Ningbo. The paper is based on an institutional perspective of clustering processes arguing that regional industrialization is subject to formal and informal institutions which shape the growth paths and contribute to divergent regional trajectories. Although these industrial parks all benefit from the general economic upswing in China, their development is influenced by different business models, economic contexts, goals and strategies, leaving room for divergence and specialization. Due to the existing structure of operations, these parks have a great deal of potential but also face substantial challenges, such as the establishment of internal networks and close customer linkages. It is argued that this might limit their innovative capability in the future. Furthermore, their growth prospects differ depending on future government policies.     

Urban imaginaries: funding mega infrastructure projects in Lagos,Nigeria

In today’s globalized world, mega infrastructure projects have emerged as one of the most popular strategies for attracting private capital and repositioning cities on the competitive landscape. The Lagos Megacity Project (LMCP) was launched to address a longstanding infrastructure crisis and to reinvent Lagos as a modern megacity. Using the LMCP as a case study, the paper examined the challenges facing the funding of mega infrastructure projects. Special attention is given to how capital is mobilized, the kinds of alliances or networks found and what gets prioritized. The paper observed that the alliance formed between the federal, Lagos and Ogun state governments to mobilize public funds quickly unraveled largely due to disputes traceable to the apportioning of fiscal and political responsibilities and the distribution of functions between the different tiers of government. Under the LMCP, disputes emerged between the federal government and the Lagos State Government (LSG) over who was responsible for what. A history of opposition politics and a highly politicized resource allocation system further made cooperation between the two particularly difficult. Furthermore, the LMCP signalled a renewed drive by the LSG to attract private investments through public–private partnership. The paper noted a host of problems but crucially there is a preference for elite projects, a practice that is reinforcing socio-spatial exclusion and confirms the persistent inequalities that accompany neoliberal and modernist projects. At the broadest level, the paper points to how modernist projects are fractured or undermined by specific ideologies and practices.