Browsing by Author "Bathelt, Harald"
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Item A Relational Approach to Regional Economic Development: Essays on Migration, Globalization, and Inequality(2021-11) Buchholz, Maximilian; Bathelt, Harald; GeographyThe rise of economic populism and movements for greater racial, gender, and class equality over the last few years have foregrounded the massive problems of spatial and social inequality in the United States. Academic research focused on these disparities increasingly suggests that a mix of rising economic inequalities across the U.S. urban system, as well as inadequate attention to deep historical economic injustices, have eroded economic mobility for many people and places. Providing concrete solutions to this issue is a thorny problem for social science and policy which requires that we address inter-regional, intra-regional, and inter-personal inequalities, as well as their interconnections. The following chapters argue that a relational perspective of economic development – one that centers how the behaviors, interactions, and organization of economic actors shape economic development – is a fruitful way forward to understanding and mitigating these inequalities. Focusing on how globalization and emerging migration patterns shape and respond to actors’ (e.g. workers, firms, and other collective organizations) economic relations, the three papers in this thesis show how a relational approach to regional economic development can be employed to better understand inequality and opportunity for different people and places across the U.S. urban system.Item Are Trade Fairs Relevant for Local Innovation Knowledge Networks? Evidence from Shanghai Equipment Manufacturing(Taylor & Francis, 2019-12) Zhu, Yi-wen; Bathelt, Harald; Zeng, GangThis paper studies the role of trade fairs in local innovation knowledge networks, combining data on co-patenting networks in the Shanghai equipment manufacturing (machinery) industry with data from the Shanghai Metalworking and CNC Machine Tool Show (MWCS). Three propositions are developed, suggesting that (i) local firms attending MWCS are more R&D intensive than other firms; (ii) trade fair attendees are linked with each other more closely in co-patenting networks than non-attendees; and (iii) participating firms have more local co-patenting linkages than non-participating firms. Our results largely support these propositions confirming that participation in flagship fairs is associated with strong integration in innovation knowledge networks.Item Between Luminaires and Meat Grinders: International Trade Fairs as Temporary Clusters(Taylor & Francis, 2008-07) Bathelt, Harald; Schuldt, NinaThis paper claims that international trade fairs, viewed as temporary clusters, are important events that support economic processes of interactive learning and knowledge creation. In such settings, geographical proximity and face-to-face contact enable actors from different countries to exchange information about markets, products and innovations. The variety of planned and unplanned meetings and the rich ecology of information flows and different forms of interaction create ‘global buzz’. Firms use such events to consciously establish ‘pipelines’ with new business partners worldwide. The paper will present empirical evidence from two flagship fairs held in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, to support these claims.Item Building Better Methods in Economic Geography(De Gruyter, 2020-09) Bathelt, Harald; Pengfei, LiThis paper suggests that it is a timely task to aim at building better methods in economic geography. While economic geography is a vibrant field, it is characterized by methodological divides and fragmentations. In presenting a collection of five papers, we address these problems by suggesting to move forward in at least five directions: bridging the qualitative/quantitative divide, clarifying causality, selecting appropriate data, improving rigor, and ensuring high ethical standards.Item Building Global Knowledge Pipelines: The Role of Temporary Clusters(Taylor & Francis, 2006-09) Maskell, Peter; Bathelt, Harald; Malmberg, AndersBusiness people and professionals come together regularly at trade fairs, exhibitions, conventions, congresses, and conferences. Here, their latest and most advanced findings, inventions and products are on display to be evaluated by customers and suppliers, as well as by peers and competitors. Participation in events like these helps firms to identify the current market frontier, take stock of relative competitive positions and form future plans. Such events exhibit many of the characteristics ascribed to permanent spatial clusters, albeit in a temporary and intensified form. These short-lived hotspots of intense knowledge exchange, network building and idea generation can thus be seen as temporary clusters. This paper compares temporary clusters with permanent clusters and other types of inter-firm interactions. If regular participation in temporary clusters can satisfy a firm's need to learn through interaction with suppliers, customers, peers and rivals, why is the phenomenon of permanent spatial clustering of similar and related economic activity so pervasive? The answer, it is claimed, lies in the restrictions imposed upon economic activity when knowledge and ideas are transformed into valuable products and services. The paper sheds new light on how interaction among firms in current clusters coincides with knowledge-intensive pipelines between firms in different regions or clusters. In doing so, it offers a novel way of understanding how inter-firm knowledge relationships are organized spatially and temporally.Item Challenges of Transformation: Innovation, Re-bundling and Traditional Manufacturing in Canada’s Technology Triangle(Taylor & Francis, 2013) Bathelt, Harald; Munro, Andrew K.; Spigel, BenThis paper develops a perspective of regional re-bundling in overcoming economic crises. It does this by focusing on the effects of the recent global financial crisis on traditional manufacturing. It analyses the structure of innovation processes and their development over time in Canada's Technology Triangle – a region known for university-related spin-off processes and successful modernization. What is less well known is that this region has been strongly influenced by traditional manufacturing industries. It is shown that these industries have been well prepared to deal with the effects of the crisis due to ongoing innovation and diversification stimulated by prior economic crises.Item China’s Outward Investment Activity: Ambiguous Findings in the Literature and Empirical Trends in Greenfield Investments(2022-03) Yang, Ruilin; Bathelt, HaraldWith the rapid increase of China’s outward foreign direct investments (OFDIs) since the early-2000s, a growing body of literature has developed that investigates investment processes and their underlying motivations and tendencies. Three important findings emerge from this literature. First, it has been noted that the generation of market and resource access have been key drivers of investment activity. Second, China’s OFDIs have accordingly focused on mature manufacturing and natural resource sectors. Third, a large proportion of OFDIs are assumed to have been directed to neighboring countries in East Asia or other developing economies, for instance in Africa. However, a literature review reveals limitations in prior studies with respect to measurement biases, database incompatibilities, the neglect of a knowledge perspective and a lack of sectoral differentiation. Descriptive analysis based on a comprehensive firm-level dataset of greenfield investments shows that previous findings are only partial. According to fDi Markets data from 2003 to 2016, OFDIs from China are more diversified and widespread than assumed. Many recent investments have a distinct knowledge motivation, are focused on high-tech and business service sectors and non-manufacturing functions, and are directed toward developed economies.Item Cluster Relations in the Media Industry: Exploring the ‘Distanced Neighbor’ Paradox in Leipzig(Taylor & Francis, 2005-02) Bathelt, HaraldThis paper uses a multidimensional cluster concept which views processes of knowledge creation as being decisive in explaining how clusters are established, why they grow and how they reproduce themselves. It is suggested that clusters can only create new knowledge and continue to grow if the cluster firm shave linkages with external markets and employ a mix of local and non-local transactions. The point made is that local interaction or ‘buzz’ and interaction through global or trans-local ‘pipelines’ create a dynamic process of knowledge creation which is key to understand a cluster’s growth process. It is argued that the lack of a reflexive mechanism of local and trans-local interaction is the reason as to why the Leipzig media industry cluster has stagnated in recent years after a decade of substantial growth. In this cluster, we are confronted with what I refer to as the ‘distanced neighbor’ paradox. Firms in the Leipzig media sector are neither characterized by strong pipelines to firms and markets outside the cluster, nor do they engage in intensive local networking and interactive learning. This paper explores the conceptual foundations of this phenomenon and applies it to the case of Leipzig.Item Clusters and Knowledge: Local buzz, Global Pipelines and the Process of Knowledge Creation(SAGE Publications, 2004-02) Bathelt, Harald; Malmberg, Anders; Maskell, PeterThe paper is concerned with spatial clustering of economic activity and its relation to the spatiality of knowledge creation in interactive learning processes. It questions the view that tacit knowledge transfer is confined to local milieus whereas codified knowledge may roam the globe almost frictionlessly. The paper highlights the conditions under which both tacit and codified knowledge can be exchanged locally and globally. A distinction is made between, on the one hand, the learning processes taking place among actors embedded in a community by just being there dubbed buzz and, on the other, the knowledge attained by investing in building channels of communication called pipelines to selected providers located outside the local milieu. It is argued that the co-existence of high levels of buzz and many pipelines may provide firms located in outward-looking and lively clusters with a string of particular advantages not available to outsiders. Finally, some policy implications, stemming from this argument, are identified.Item Conceptualizing Multiple Clusters in Mega-City Regions: The Case of the Biomedical Industry in Beijing(Elsevier, 2016) Bathelt, Harald; Zhao, JingyuanThis paper introduces a unique industrial configuration that has emerged in Beijing, where three economic clusters in the biomedical industry, originally established as industrial/research parks, have developed parallel to each other. This configuration of multiple co-located clusters of the same industry, which has not been discussed before, raises the question of whether the industrial/research parks are competing for the same resources, or whether they are complementary to each other and can collectively be viewed as a new type of industrial configuration. The paper conceptualizes a framework of multiple clusters in mega-city regions that distinguishes between collaborating and competing clusters and presents initial empirical evidence for the Beijing case. As such, this research aims to unravel the phenomenon of multiple clusters in mega-city regions and to understand the complex spatial interrelationships that exist within and beyond multiple co-located clusters in the same industry.Item Correction – Outward Foreign-Direct Investments as a Catalyst of Urban-Regional Income Development? Evidence from the United States(Taylor & Francis, 2020-01) Bathelt, Harald; Buchholz, MaximilianItem The Creation of Knowledge: Local Building, Global Accessing and Economic Development – Toward an Agenda(Oxford University Press, 2014-07) Bathelt, Harald; Cohendet, PatrickThis article argues that local knowledge building and global (nonlocal) knowledge-accessing practices in economic development are intrinsically interwoven. They generate fundamental feedback loops, which are channeled through and lead to ongoing knowledge circulation. To better understand the nature of the specific mechanisms and conditions underlying these processes, three key areas of research are identified for current and future research. These are related to (i) creative agents and the nature of local creative processes, (ii) community formation and local creativity from ideas to market penetration and (iii) temporary gatherings as translocal knowledge platforms.Item Cross-Local Knowledge Fertilization, Cluster Emergence and the Generation of Buzz(Oxford University Press, 2018-03) Henn, Sebastian; Bathelt, HaraldRecent work in economic geography has investigated how clusters evolve and change over time. Yet our understanding of such processes is still incomplete. Many accounts rest on a perspective that focuses on the development of solitary knowledge ecologies, while neglecting the fact that cluster formation may be triggered when different places are connected and begin to influence each other in mutual beneficial ways. This paper argues that conceptualizations of cluster emergence need to understand the crucial ways in which this process is from the very beginning associated with external linkages and trans-local pipelines. A model of cluster formation is presented that suggests how buzz generation is driven by the connections between different localities in four stages: (i) pioneering, (ii) expansion, (iii) off-shoot and (iv) fusion. We use the case of the global diamond industry, in both inductive and deductive ways, as an example to show that transnational communities and tight relational networks play a crucial role in forming cross-local connections that can trigger cluster emergence.Item The Development of Trade Fair Ecologies in China: Case Studies from Chengdu and Shanghai(SAGE Publications, 2014-03) Bathelt, Harald; Zeng, GangDespite China's rapid economic growth and embedding into global value chains, not much is known about the primary places where buyers and sellers from China and abroad meet, do business, and circulate information and knowledge: That is, the national/international trade fairs in the country. Previous reports suggest that the number and size of such events in China is growing and that the trade fair business is in the process of catching up. Under these circumstances, trade fairs may develop into import or export events, where buyers and sellers engage in transactions, or into temporary clusters, where they exchange knowledge for industrial upgrading and innovation. In this context this paper explores the interaction and communication patterns of firms at Chinese trade fairs and investigates whether these events are similar to those in Europe and North America. The analysis involves systematic comparison of the communication and interaction practices at three national/international trade fairs in Shanghai and Chengdu, based on a total of 102 semistructured interviews.Item Divergent Growth Trajectories in China’s Chemical Industry: The Case of the Newly Developed Industrial Parks in Shanghai, Nanjing and Ningbo(Springer, 2011) Zeng, Gang; Bathelt, HaraldIn 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 institutional arrangements 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.Item Dynamic Capitalisms? Understanding Patterns of Technological Specialization through an Exploration of Interfirm Interaction at International Trade Fairs(2018-11) Gibson, Rachael Elizabeth; Bathelt, Harald; Political ScienceIn recent years, the study of comparative capitalisms has raised important questions about the dynamic elements of capitalist diversity and the need for better explanations of institutional change. Building on this and related literatures in political economy and economic geography, this thesis explores a source of economic dynamism that has been overlooked in political science: international trade fairs. Despite their relative neglect in this field, trade fairs have long been recognized as an important promotional and sales tool. More recently, scholars have conceptualized trade fairs as critical sites through which global knowledge flows are circulated and ideas for innovation explored. From this perspective, trade fairs represent important platforms for networking, interactive learning, and knowledge exchange because they foster intense interactions among actors despite spatial boundaries. And, since trade fairs are organized according to a specific technological or industry focus, they facilitate interactions between firms from different capitalist varieties. Through the diffusion of state-of-the-art knowledge, trade fairs may serve as drivers of economic globalization, challenging the continuation of distinct capitalist varieties by enabling cross-system convergence regarding the technological specialization of firms. Yet, it is clear that countries have retained competitive advantages in specific industries and that full convergence has not taken place. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this thesis addresses this puzzle, first, by exploring the micro-processes of search through a qualitative study. Using the garbage-can model and the “organized anarchy” concept, it finds that firms’ search processes rarely follow a linear or rational trajectory; yet, they are guided by the pre-existing production contexts and knowledge bases of their home countries. The empirical foundations of these findings are broadened through a quantitative study, which identifies different learning and search patterns between German and U.S. firms at trade fairs, largely consistent with the Varieties of Capitalism perspective. Taken together, the analysis reveals the path-dependent nature of firms’ search processes and suggests that firms from different countries are embedded in distinct paths and tend to follow their specific pathway. The thesis highlights the role of trade fairs as mediators of global economic processes and calls for greater attention to these events in political science.Item Economic Geography and Industrial Marketing Views on Trade Shows: Collective Marketing and Knowledge Circulation(Elsevier, 2017-02) Rinallo, Diego; Bathelt, Harald; Golfetto, FrancescaIn this paper, we critically review literature on trade shows developed in industrial marketing (IM) and economic geography (EG), aiming to contribute to the ongoing conversation between these disciplines and showing that they can learn from each other. In IM, trade shows are conceived as promotional instruments, whereas in EG these events are seen as temporary clusters through which firms can escape the liabilities of embeddedness and interact with, and learn from, distant actors. EG literature has integrated insights from IM that have provided a means to go beyond earlier formulations that downplayed market-based learning processes at these events. IM has in fact far under-theorized space and conceived exhibitors as individual agents, neglecting the fact that many of these events are collective marketing platforms that industry agglomerations or geographical clusters can use to affirm their presence in international markets. Based on our analysis, we propose research directions that can benefit individual exhibitors as well as geographically-based business networks. The analysis addresses the boundaries and limitations of disciplinary analyses and strongly suggests transdisciplinary encounters and engagements in IM and EG research.Item Editorial: Economic Geography IMPULSES(Oxford University Press, 2017-09-19) Bathelt, Harald; Coe, Neil M.; Kerr, William R.; Robert-Nicoud, FrédéricThe Journal of Economic Geography has decided to offer such a platform, referred to as ‘IMPULSES’, from now on. The new IMPULSES section will appear at irregular intervals to present papers tackling conceptual debates and future developments across the field. Contributions to this section can include new conceptualizations, discussions or re-developments of existing concepts, or informed reviews and reflections about the field. Pieces that engage with cross-field methodological integration and challenges will also be considered, as will those that address economic geography’s policy interface. We request that these contributions relate to ongoing debates in economic geography and speak broadly to geography, economics and/or related fields in novel ways. The IMPULSES section is not designed as an outlet for quick opinion pieces or short commentaries – rather we wish to publish fully-developed article-length contributions and conceptualizations that have undergone a normal review process and can potentially have a broad impact on the field. Beyond these general parameters, however, we do not wish to be prescriptive. Economic geography, as ever, is what we collectively make of it, and we look forward to receiving thought-provoking and innovative work that can trigger a new round of relevant and engaged work in our vitally important field.Item The Emergence of Regional Cultures and Practices: A Comparative Study of Canadian Software Entrepreneurship(2014-01-14) Spigel, Benjamin ; Bathelt, Harald ; GeographyDespite the ‘cultural turn’ in economic geography, the discipline has yet to conclusively describe the processes through which culture influences actors’ daily economic and social practices. Without a better understanding of the role of culture, it is difficult to explain the emergence and influence of the heterogeneous landscapes of regional business culture we readily observe. This problem is particularly acute in the study of entrepreneurial environments, where regional culture is theorized to play an important role in the local entrepreneurship process. This dissertation proposes an alternative approach to culture which draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to reveal the underlying social processes connecting culture with entrepreneurial action. Through qualitative case studies of software entrepreneurs in three Canadian cities — Kitchener- Waterloo, Ontario; Ottawa, Ontario and Calgary, Alberta — this dissertation examines the emergence and evolution of regional cultures and how they have helped to create distinct contexts which encourage unique forms of entrepreneurial practices, outlooks and strategies. This new perspective allows for a more detailed and dynamic analysis of regional cultures and provides new tools for researchers and policy makers to understand the role of cultures within regional economic development.Item Exporting the German Model: the Establishment of a New Automobile Industry Cluster in Shanghai, P.R. China(Wiley, 2005-01) Depner, Heiner; Bathelt, HaraldRecent work has provided evidence that the establishment of new industry clusters cannot be jump-started through policy initiatives alone. This evidence does not imply, however, that the genesis of a new cluster cannot be planned at all. Especially in the context of a developing economy, it seems useful to reinvestigate the relation among economic development, the strategies of multinational firms, and state intervention in this respect. Drawing from the case of the automobile industry and its supplier system in Shanghai in which German firms play an important role, we provide empirical evidence of the evolution of a new cluster that is supported by the state in various forms and characterized by a focal, hierarchically structured production system. We use a multidimensional approach to clusters, which leads to a more nuanced understanding of the evolution and growth of a cluster than that provided by earlier accounts. This approach allows us to distinguish the development of the Shanghai automobile industry cluster along its vertical, horizontal, external, institutional, and power dimensions. We provide evidence that another dimension—“culture”—plays an important role, especially in its relation to issues of power and institutions. The role of this dimension is demonstrated in the case of German firms, which tap into the Chinese innovation system. This system is characterized by particular business relations, institutions, norms, and various social practices that are new to German firms. We demonstrate how this difference creates problems in establishing local production and supplier relations and how these problems can be overcome.