Progress in Economic Geography最新文献

Processes of creation and innovation become increasingly mobile and temporarily make use of collaborative (work)spaces for paid and unpaid work, tinkering, social experimentation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship. Diverse forms of collaborative workspaces (CWSs) proliferated in many cities worldwide in the past 15 years and manifested in a diversity of forms, such as e.g. fablabs, maker-, hacker-, or coworking spaces. Despite the diversity, these spaces share three distinctive features: openness for a diversified set of users, aspiration to promote creative processes, and potential to allow for societal experimentation. So far, empirical research either highlights their functions in safeguarding the deficiencies related to new work regimes or the affordances for fostering collaborative creativity and innovation. We propose career resilience as a concept to integrate both perspectives. We investigate CWSs as locally situated contexts enabling users to combine stabilising and transformative resources to advance their careers. The paper draws on more than 100 qualitative interviews with operators, managers, and users of CWSs in the metropolitan regions Amsterdam, Berlin, and Detroit. We inductively develop five different types of practices that address fundamental career related uncertainties to individual and collective measures to create career resilience. In CWSs, users seek company, focus, assets, guidance, and meaning. CWSs are thus spatial and organisational settings that complement multisited, mobile work practices and that illustrate the importance of permanent organisational and material places in increasingly volatile working environments.

Industries and regions are facing socio-technical landscape pressures to enter green transitions. Coastal industrial regions, often with traditional heavy industries in marine and maritime activities, are under both significant pressures from international organizations and governments to decarbonise, but also find themselves with sizeable opportunities to use green transitions to revitalize and upgrade what are typically declining traditional manufacturing regions. Using 30 semi-structured interviews, we explore the challenges facing green path upgrading in the Solent region of South-East UK. By synthesizing the emerging economic geography literature on inter-path dynamics with the multi-system dynamics approach from the multi-level perspective literature, we find evidence of eight green niches emerging, yet the five main marine and maritime socio-technical systems in the region have struggled to develop and integrate these green technology niches. Consequently, path upgrading has been stifled. We find that the competitive intra-path dynamics between socio-technical systems and emerging technology niches within the Solent marine and maritime pathway, and competitive inter-path dynamics with other industrial pathways beyond the Solent have inhibited the co-ordination and coupling necessary for resource mobilization and green path upgrading. This approach enables us to broaden existing economic geography perspectives of multi-path dynamics, conceptualizing how inter- and intra-path development may work in economic geography, which has thus far mainly focused on single path dynamics and successful path creation.

The accessibility and availability of information play an important role in defining the spatial distribution of financial activities and the relative competitiveness and specialisation of different financial centres. But investigations into the geographies of financial information are frequently constrained by the lack of consistent data at a global scale, especially on the distribution and reach of information-intensive financial professionals. This paper addresses this methodological gap by offering insights into the geographies of sell-side equity research, a subset of highly specialised information intermediaries within the financial ecosystem. It identifies and maps the global distribution of 11,307 analysts, the geographic scope of their activities, and the industry structure of their information collection. In aggregate, this gives insights into the size, reach and role of different centres in information hierarchies and networks. Our findings confirm that information resources remain highly concentrated and that most research coverage is in-country rather than cross-border, highlighting the continued frictions to information flows created by national borders. Domestic activities – analysts at domestic brokers covering domestic corporates – is the single largest category of information collection across most financial centres, regardless of size. Import activities are the second most frequent type of information collection highlighting the need of firms to access remote information networks. London is relatively unique at the global level given its platform role as Europe’s information nexus, a role shared by Singapore in Southeast Asia and by Dubai in the Middle East.

In this short paper we consider the potential for global production network (GPN) thinking to elucidate the fundamental challenge of decarbonising the global economy. We make two points in this regard. First, we posit that GPN thinking offers the potential for analytical precision in terms of delineating individual GPNs and the ways in which they intersect and aggregate, an important step in developing meaningful analyses of decarbonisation efforts. Second, we explore the heterogeneous materiality of production and consider its implications for the calculability of decarbonisation. We argue that GPN analysis must refine its existing tools and develop new ones to play an important role in analyzing the necessary decarbonisation of the global economy, in turn enhancing economic geography's relevance in the context of the ongoing climate crisis.