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This open access book bridges the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences to explore the role of social institutions in shaping geographical contexts, and in creating new knowledge. It includes theorizations as well as original empirical case studies on the emergence, maintenance and change of institutions as well as on their constraining and enabling effects on innovation, entrepreneurship, art and cultural heritage, often at regional scales across Europe and North America. Rooted in the disciplines of management and organization studies, sociology, geography, political science, and economics the contributors all take comprehensive approaches to carve out the specific contextuality of institutions as well as their impact on societal outcomes. Not only does this book offer detailed insights into current debates in institutional theory, it also provides background for scholars, students, and professionals at the intersection between regional development, policy-making, and regulation.
How are firms, networks of firms, and production systems organized and how does this organization vary from place to place? This book synthesizes theories from across the social sciences with empirical research and case studies in order to answer this question.
This open access book focuses on theoretical and empirical intersections between governance, knowledge and space from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions elucidate how knowledge is a prerequisite as well as a driver of governance efficacy, and conversely, how governance affects the creation and use of knowledge and innovation in geographical context. Scholars from the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, public administration, political science, sociology, and organization studies provide original theoretical discussions along these interdependencies. Moreover, a variety of empirical chapters on governance issues, ranging from regional and national to global scales and covering case studies in Australia, Europe, Latina America, North America and South Africa demonstrate that geography and space are not only important contexts for governance that affect the contingent outcomes of governance blueprints. Governance also creates spaces. It affects the geographical confines as well as the quality of opportunities and constraints that actors enjoy to establish legitimate and sustainable ways of social and environmental co-existence.
This open access book focuses on the role of civil society in the creation, dissemination, and interpretation of knowledge in geographical contexts. It offers original, interdisciplinary and counterintuitive perspectives on civil society. The book includes reflections on civil and uncivil society, the role of civil society as a change agent, and on civil society perspectives of undone science. Conceptual approaches go beyond the tripartite division of public, private and civic sectors to propose new frameworks of civic networks and philanthropic fields, which take an inclusive view of the connectivity of civic agency across sectors. This includes relational analyses of epistemic power in civ...
The broad spectrum of topics surrounding what is termed the ‘knowledge economy’ has attracted increasing attention from the scientific community in recent years. The nature of knowledge-intensive industries, the spatiality of knowledge, the role of proximity and distance in generating functional knowledge, the transfer of knowledge via networks, and the complex interplay between knowledge, location and economic development are all live academic issues. This book, the fifth volume in Springer’s Knowledge and Space series, focuses on the last of these: the multiple relationships between knowledge, the economy, and space. It reflects the conceptual and methodological multidisciplinarity e...
This open access book takes an original view on the social production of knowledge in and across space. It explores how people build and transfer proficiency within and beyond the bounds of social groups. Social groups, such as professions, epistemic communities, or academic disciplines, collectively organize to help individuals gain understanding of and knowledge about specific subjects of expertise. Yet, at the same time, they frame legitimate ways of thinking and learning, and they sanction other ways of knowing that are collectively seen as false, inelegant, or inappropriate etc. Acknowledging the interdependency between proficiency and professions, the interdisciplinary contributions to...
This book discusses a core question in many fields of the social sciences, namely how to create, share and adopt new knowledge. It creates an original space for conversation between two lines of research that have developed largely in parallel for a long time: social network theory and the geography of knowledge. This book considers that relational thinking has become increasingly important for scholars to capture societal outcomes by studying social relations and networks, whereas the role of place, space and spatial scales has been somewhat neglected outside an emergent geography of knowledge. The individual contributions help integrate network arguments of connectivity, geographical argum...
academic disciplines. --Book Jacket.
Presenting multidisciplinary and global insights, this book explores the nexus between economies, institutions, and territories and how global phenomena have local consequences. It examines how original and innovative economic related processes embed themselves in societies at the local level; how boundaries between the state and the market are placed under stress by unexpected changes. It explores whether new types of elites and forms of social inequalities are emerging as a result of institutional and economic changes, and whether peripheral areas are experiencing insidious forms of economic and institutional lock-in. Presenting empirical cases and useful analytical and conceptual tools, the book makes current economic and territorial phenomena more understandable. This is an important read for students and scholars in the fields of geography, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, economics, regional science, and international relations. It is also a valuable resource for policymakers, well-educated lay readers and economic, political and international relations journalists.
Current corporate structures based on internationalisation and decentralisation are opposed to the nature of the most important resource: knowledge. The acquisition and exchange of (tacit) knowledge relies on interpersonal interactions and is thus time- and place-dependent. Given that the combination of heterogeneous knowledge stocks furthers innovation, organisations develop strategies to ensure the transfer of knowledge. To enable intra-organisational knowledge flows spatial mobility at the workplace affects a wide range of employees. The study examines in which ways spatially mobile employees, i.e. expatriates, contribute to those knowledge flows. The study of ego networks reveals not onl...