Mário Vale

Proximity and Knowledge Governance in Localized Production Systems: The Footwear Industry in the North Region of Portugal

Abstract Proximity is a key concept in the explanation of traditional and emergent production systems. Recently, the role of geographical proximity has been qualified on the basis of the argument that other types of proximity should also be taken into account in the explanation of innovation and, particularly, knowledge governance in production systems (e.g. sectoral innovation systems, global production networks, etc.). Drawing on in-depth research at the level of the company, this paper discusses to what extent the introduction of new technology, fashion and design, and control of distribution networks is changing the localized footwear production system in the North region of Portugal. The results indicate how leading innovative companies are developing distant spatial relationships in order to gain access to new critical knowledge using different strategies that are modifying the very nature of the spatial agglomeration. As new types of proximity emerge and new governance mechanisms are put in place, we argue that a new industrial and innovation policy is needed to sustain these traditional industrial agglomerations.

Innovation and Knowledge Driven by a Focal Corporation The Case of the Autoeuropa Supply Chain

Traditionally, transnational subsidiaries in peripheral regions were labelled ‘cathedrals in the desert’ as they did not establish significant links with local or regional producers and did not control the decisionmaking process. The work of economists and geographers has tended to be heavily influenced by the branch plant stereotype. However, this rather basic vision of reality is now changing as inward investments promoted by transnational corporations (TNCs) become more embedded in the region. It seems there is a new strategy of foreign firms in relation to local firms and institutions, as evidenced by the technological knowledge governance and learning processes in supply chains polarized by some TNC subsidiaries. In this paper we first assess the role of technological externalities as a new industrial location factor in the era of globalization. These externalities reinforce localization of innovative firms rather than stimulate spatial dispersion. Even TNC subsidiaries are more embedded in the host regions as globalization accelerates. Second, we analyse the features of the Autoeuropa (AE) supply chain in Portugal, namely the type of suppliers (firm size, origin of capital, markets and so forth) and their position in the hierarchical supply chain of AE. Finally, we assess external knowledge and innovation driven by Autoeuropa itself among suppliers, and we discuss the main benefits as well as the basic problems of such a form of knowledge creation and diffusion.

Economic restructuring, social re-composition and recent urban changes in Portugal

The productive restructuring process has affected more than just the economic field, because its effects have been felt on urbanisation processes, on social relations, and on the spatial organisation of society. Starting from the ‘metapolis’ concept, developed by Ascher (1995), we analyse the evolution of new forms of urban space in Portugal, arguing that new urban forms generate new social inequalities and, in extreme cases, social exclusion. Portugal is a semi-peripheral country that combines certain of the trends in social and economic organisation common to core countries, with certain trends more common in the developing world. Thus the understanding of urban change in Portugal is a complex task, made more difficult by the rapidity of processes since the mid 1970s. The Lisbon Metropolitan Area has been deeply affected by the productive restructuring process. The role of economic and urban policies in the Lisbon region is discussed, and an assessment is made of certain measures aimed at solving economic and social problems.

FASHION AND THE GOVERNANCE OF KNOWLEDGE IN A TRADITIONAL INDUSTRY: THE CASE OF THE FOOTWEAR SECTORAL INNOVATION SYSTEM IN THE NORTHERN REGION OF PORTUGAL

Abstract The paper deals with the footwear industry as a sectoral innovation system. It particularly focuses on the incidental role of fashion in restructuring and innovation within the footwear production. The importance taken by fashion leads towards a more complicated reading of the recent changes of this industry, regarding its organization, innovation processes, and its mode of technological knowledge governance. More especially, within the traditional footwear industry, low levels of knowledge appropriability were combined with low cumulativeness in firms with low-innovative activity. However, as fashion was incorporated in the footwear industry, technological knowledge governance evolves towards higher cumulativeness at least at the industry level. This contribution discusses in detail the pervasiveness of fashion onto the footwear industry. It especially shows how the numerous agents involved in the fashion knowledge production and their geographical concentration allow for increasing returns when they align well with knowledge cumulativeness at the industry level. It also reveals that the renewed knowledge base of fashion exhibits a higher degree of tacitness and typically develops along an external localized knowledge base.

Multi-purpose Vehicles, a New Opportunity for the Periphery? Lessons from the Ford\VW Project (Portugal)

This chapter explores the qualitative and quantitative significance of the appearance of a new segment in the automobile market — the multi-purpose vehicle or people carrier — and relates it to current global restructuring in the auto industry. Within this context, the FordWW Project in Setubal, Portugal (named AutoEuropa, with each company holding a 50 per cent share) possesses a two-fold paradigmatic value. On the one hand, it clearly illustrates one type of cooperative strategy between American and European companies in response to Japanese competition in the world’s largest market, that of the European Community. On the other hand, it reflects the opportunities and difficulties which a project of this kind can bring for a small, semi-peripheral country like Portugal. Consideration of both these aspects allows an identification of new factors involved in redrawing the map of the European automobile production system.

Book review symposium: Crisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe, Costis HadjimichalisHadjimichalisCostisCrisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London: Routledge, 2018. xiii + 217 pp. ISBN: 9781138184503£105.00

This is quite a remarkable book, a product of years of careful and original research into the question of uneven and combined development in southern Europe (SE), informed by a sophisticated Marxian political economy perspective – one in which the influence of Antonio Gramsci and an emphasis on the cultural and political constitution and consequences of the capitalist economy is always prominent. Hadjimichalis combines a breadth and depth of evidence from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from across Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain with a rare political and theoretical sophistication, drawing on a deep knowledge of cross-disciplinary and multi-lingual literatures. I find it difficult to imagine anyone else being able to do this, and certainly not with the depth of scholarship and political insight that he reveals. The book is a rare achievement, one that should be widely read, both by academics interested in questions of uneven development and the future of Europe and by European Union (EU) politicians and policy-makers as they grapple with the task of finding a way forward out of post-austerity Europe and onto a socially more progressive development trajectory. As Hadjimichalis explains, there are good, sound reasons for focusing upon SE. Greece, Portugal and Spain all made the transition from dictatorships to democracy in the 1970s and became members of the European Community (EC, as it was then) in the 1980s. Italy was in a sense the ‘odd one out’ of the original six member states of the EC, although like its southern European neighbours it also had its own earlier history of profoundly uneven development and a transition from dictatorship to democracy. Furthermore, by the 1980s all four had broadly similar economic and social structures – certainly not identical and with differences among them but with enough commonality to distinguish them from the other member states of the EU. In addition, by 2009/2010 all four were in the grip of severe economic and financial crises. While these are issues on which he had been working for many years (for example, see Hadjimichalis, 1987), as Hadjimichalis explains the immediate stimulus for writing this book was an Book review symposium

Living PlanIT and the development of the "PlanIT Urban Operating SystemTM": the geographies of an innovation

This case study explores the development of the PlanIT Urban Operating SystemTM, a complex middleware platform designed to link a city’s sub-systems (for example the built environment, safety and security, energy, water), harmonizing resource flows towards manifold efficiency gains. This chapter explores the spatial and organizational context of the proponent company, Living PlanIT SA, currently headquartered in Switzerland but with relevant operations in other milieus, namely in the north of Portugal. Despite the codification of the core technology, the chapter illustrates how the interaction with different milieus provided (and keeps providing) unique resources for the technology’s development, commercialization and societal legitimation.