The Relational Economy potx

[...]... understand the complex interplay between the two The economic and the social are fundamentally intertwined; they are dimensions of the same empirical reality As such, they should be studied in the context of a dialogue between perspectives, rather than in mutual exclusion and reductionist prioritization (Stark 2000) This is what we emphasize in the relational conceptualization developed in this book The goal... sociological/cultural theory and quantitative versus qualitative methodology In our view, the discussion is unclear because it mixes normative accounts of the discipline’s policy implications with epistemological and methodological arguments The problem of diverse turns is that they are guided by political arguments and opinions which lead to conflict between 4 THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY the fields They are based... in the form of journal articles, book chapters, and working papers over the past decade Although the book does not reproduce any of these sources, it draws on the ideas developed there in the sense that it is part of an ongoing academic project, and is an expression of the evolution in our conceptual and empirical academic activities Acknowledgements to the original sources are as follows: Some of the. .. complex and spread-out to include a 10 THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY growing number of firms in different stages of the production process, located in an increasing number of countries throughout the world The focus of this work addresses the changing nature of production and marketing linkages within the value chain The spatiality of such dynamics is, however, often secondary in these analyses This is clearly visible... development Their original distinction of different network forms of governance has developed further in the collaborative work of Gereffi et al (2005) In combining different strands of the literature, they identify three variables that impact the type of governance form present in global value chains: (a) the degree of complexity, (b) the degree of codification, and (c) the capability of the supplier... Based on these and similar propositions, a relational agency-centred approach to economic geography (Clark and Tracey 2004; van Wezemael 2004) emphasizes processes of economic action and interaction that need to be analysed in spatial perspective In the context of the geography of the firm, which is the central focus of this book, such an analysis would include the following: 14 THE RELATIONAL ECONOMY. .. geographies The analysis refreshes the tradition of corporate geography and links it with research in organization studies to disentangle a relational view of the knowledge organization The chapter uses the results obtained from detailed empirical network research in a global technology service firm to investigate the dimensions of global intrafirm knowledge flows and their vulnerability The importance of the. .. summarizes the main arguments of the relational conceptualization emphasizing differences compared with other approaches It argues that relational thinking is particularly useful in analysing the global knowledge economy and its dynamic geographies In the form of an outlook, it discusses conceptual and empirical challenges in the future This page intentionally left blank Part I Foundations of Relational. .. informed our thinking These are the milieu school, which focuses on the social foundations of regional innovation, conceptions of global value chains and production networks, and ideas of geographies of practices From this vantage point, we emphasize the importance of a spatial perspective in analysing the knowledge economy In light of these issues, this chapter will outline the structure of the book, and... Later, the concept of untraded interdependencies was introduced to further explain the genesis and growth of industrial agglomerations (see also Storper and Venables 2004), as opposed to the traded interdependencies which have been the focus of traditional approaches Emphasizing the role of context, Storper’s conceptualization (1997c) of the ‘holy trinity’ defines technology, organization, 6 THE RELATIONAL .