Harald Bathelt

Building global knowledge pipelines: The role of temporary clusters

Abstract Business 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 firms 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.

The Relational Economy: Geographies of Knowing and Learning

How are firms, networks of firms, and production systems organized and how does this organization vary from place to place? What are the new geographies emerging from the need to create, access, and share knowledge, and sustain competitiveness? In what ways are local clusters and global exchange relations intertwined and co-constituted? What are the impacts of global changes in technology, demand, and competition on the organization of production, and how do these effects vary between communities, regions, and nations? This book synthesizes theories from across the social sciences with empirical research and case studies in order to answer these questions and to demonstrate how people and firms organize economic action and interaction across local, national, and global flows of knowledge and innovation. It is structured in four clear parts: - Part I: Foundations of Relational Thinking - Part II: Relational Clusters of Knowledge - Part III: Knowledge Circulation Across Territories - Part IV: Toward a Relational Economic Policy? The book employs a novel relational framework, which recognizes values, interpretative frameworks, and decision-making practices as subject to the contextuality of the social institutions that characterize the relationships between the human agents. It will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate students across the social sciences, and practitioners in clusters policy.

Toward a Reconceptualization of Regional Development Paths: Is Leipzig's Media Cluster a Continuation of or a Rupture with the Past?

Abstract This article develops a model of regional development that is then used to examine the evolution of two media industries in Leipzig, Germany. We note that the city’s current media cluster, centered on television/film production and interactive digital media, shares little in common with the city’s once-premier book publishing media cluster. Treating interactive learning as the primary causal mechanism that drives economic growth and change, our conceptual framework incorporates both sectoral/technological and political crises as mechanisms that rupture regional development paths. These regional development paths are not homogeneous, but instead consist of bundles of various technological trajectories. Regions recover from crises as their actors continually rebundle local assets until they find a combination that generates growth. As a result of these crises, new opportunities for growth may arise for new and previously marginal industries. In turn, these expanding industries shape the region’s development path.

Geographies of production: growth regimes in spatial perspective 3 - toward a relational view of economic action and policy

The version of record [Bathelt, H. (2006). Geographies of production: Growth regimes in spatial perspective 3 – Toward a relational view of economic action and policy. Progress in Human Geography, 30(2), 223-236.] is available online at: http://phg.sagepub.com/content/30/2/223 [doi: 10.1191/0309132506ph603pr]

Exporting the German Model: The Establishment of a New Automobile Industry Cluster in Shanghai

Abstract Recent 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.

Resources in Economic Geography: From Substantive Concepts towards a Relational Perspective

Resources are crucial for the technological and economic development of firms in spatial perspective. In this paper we contrast two ways of conceptualizing resources, and argue that a conventional, substantive understanding implies a number of shortcomings which can be overcome through the application of a relational conception of resources. In examining four types of resources—material resources, knowledge, power, and social capital—our argument is that resources are constituted in a relational way in two aspects. First, resources are relational in that their generation, interpretation, and use are contingent. This depends on the particular institutional structures and social relations, as well as on the knowledge contexts and mental models of the agents involved. Second, some types of resources, such as power and social capital, are also relational because they cannot be possessed or controlled by individual agents. They are built and mobilized through day-to-day social practices. Individuals or groups of agents may appropriate the returns, but not the resources themselves. We conclude that a relational concept reflects the contextual and interactive nature of the selection, use, and formation of resources. This offers new insights into the explanation of heterogeneity in firm strategies and trajectories, as well as regional differences in the development of localized industry configurations, such as clusters.

The Re-emergence of a Media Industry Cluster in Leipzig

This paper begins with the proposition that an analysis of the potentialities of industrial networks has to consider the wider context of the social organization of production. Recent work on industrial clustering has shown that successful clusters are embedded in tight networks of social relations between suppliers, producers, customers and institutions. Localized capabilities, such as specialized resources and skills, conventions and other local institutional structures, provide the basis for inter-firm cooperation. Based on Malmberg and Maskells (2001) conceptualization of localized industrial clusters, I discuss the horizontal, vertical and institutional cluster dimensions as a basis for empirical analysis. In addition, attention will be drawn to the external dimension and power relations of a cluster which have a strong impact on its growth trajectory. This conceptualization is used as a basis for studying the new Leipzig media industry cluster. Leipzig, which is located in the Neue Länder (States of the former German Democratic Republic), has traditionally been a major centre of industrial production in Germany. After the German unification, a significant proportion of Leipzigs manufacturing activities were terminated or downsized. Interestingly, a new media cluster has developed during the 1990s, driven by the activities of the MDR (Middle German Television and Broadcasting Service). This has stimulated substantial start-up activities in branches of the media industry, such as film/TV production, new electronic services/interactive media, graphics/design, PR/marketing and media-related hardware/software. Being virtually the only sector which has grown in recent years, the media sector has stabilized the local economy. In this paper, I investigate those forces which have supported start-up and location decisions of media firms and the role of local institutions and policy programmes in the clustering process.

Institutional change in economic geography

This paper develops a rigorous concept of institutions to investigate the interrelationships between institutional and economic change from the perspective of economic geography. We view institutions neither as behavioural regularities nor as organizations or rules, but conceive institutions as stabilizations of mutual expectations and correlated interaction. The paper discusses how economic interaction in space is shaped by existing institutions, how this leads to economic decisions and new rounds of action, and how their intended and unintended consequences impact or enact new/existing institutions. The paper explores three modes of institutional change – hysteresis, emergent change, and institutional entrepreneurship.

Clusters, Power and Place: Inequality and Local Growth in Time–Space

The argument of this paper is that a deeper appreciation of the nature of the power relationships between firms and the circuits of power that bind them together is key to understanding how clusters function — including how they might emerge and how they might decline. We begin to develop a conceptualization that allows us to generate a deeper understanding of the processes that enable the production and reproduction of enterprise clusters under some combinations of circumstances but not others. The sections of the paper explore: (1) concepts of power and circuits of power including their spatialities; (2) the temporarily stabilized relationships which occur in clusters of economic activity; (3) the openness and permeability of clusters as a way of understanding conditions that foster cluster growth; (4) a tentative integration of concepts. From this reading of the concepts of clustering and power we draw the conclusion that clusters are, at any particular point in time, temporary and transient conjunctures of interfirm relationships. They depend on specific circumstances in ‘time–space’ and, because of their very transience and specificity, those conditions might be very difficult if not impossible to create through the blunt instruments of policy.

International Trade Fairs and Global Buzz, Part I: Ecology of Global Buzz

This paper investigates the importance of temporary face-to-face (F2F) contact and the physical co-presence of global communities in establishing a particular information and communication ecology during international trade fairs, referred to as “global buzz”. International trade fairs bring together agents from all over the world and create temporary spaces for presentation and interaction. Within a specific institutional setting, participants not only acquire knowledge through F2F communication with other agents, but also obtain information by observing and systematically monitoring other participants. The fact that firms do not necessarily have to be in direct contact with a specific source of information to get access to this knowledge makes participation in these events extremely valuable. International trade fairs have become important expressions of new geographies of circulation through which knowledge is created and exchanged at a distance. This paper analyses the constituting components of global buzz and aims to dismantle the complexity of this phenomenon in a multi-dimensional way. When applying this concept to Internet trade fairs, the question arises whether a similar information and communication ecology, or virtual buzz, can be established. We explore similarities and differences between both forms of buzz, using the same classification scheme.