Mia Gray

Industrial Change and Regional Development: The Case of the US Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries

We examine the arguments surrounding the location and organization of innovative firms and examine the prospects for industry renewal and regional rejuvenation. We examine the effect of technological breakthroughs in the biotechnology industry on the organization and location of production with respect to mature and emergent regions. We find that, despite losing much of their preeminence in research and development, traditional firms in mature regions have managed to ‘capture’ a substantial amount of manufacturing and marketing. The drug-development experience, manufacturing capabilities, and marketing channels of more established companies in mature regions are turning out to be major sources of competitive advantage.

Networks of exclusion : job segmentation and social networks in the knowledge economy

Purpose – This paper aims to highlight the need to understand the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the workplace which are often embedded in micro-level work practices. It explores how soci ...

New Industrial Cities? The Four Faces of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has been admired and much emulated as an American version of a new industrial district based on its heavily networked, small-firm, innovative electronics sector. This industrial structure has been argued to give the region a uniquely cooperative, flexible, and dynamic structure. Based on field research and data analysis, we argue that Silicon Valleys success and culture owes much to the presence and success of large organizations-its defense industrial complex, its headquarters and high-tech branch operations of large domestic firms, and the recent entry of foreign firm operations. Relationships among these large organizations are more often characterized by competitive, arms length relationships, market power imbalance, cooperation with organizations external to the district, and relatively low levels of interorganizational mobility of personnel. These relationships undermine the cooperation, innovation, and governance conditions celebrated by the new industrial districts scholars. Furthermore, their modus operandi tends to raise the regional cost of doing business and exacerbates centrifugal tendencies in corporate location and dualism in income distribution. Silicon Valley may not be as easy to replicate as many have assumed, nor does it deserve unalloyed high marks as a regional prototype.

Learning from Las Vegas: Unions and post-industrial urbanisation

Las Vegas is often portrayed as the apogee of postmodern urbanism, but we argue that you cannot understand Las Vegas without understanding the role of unions in the City’s political economy. By focusing on the social relations surrounding workplace, class, and gender we highlight alternative versions of Las Vegas’ history. The Culinary Union, a UNITE HERE local, has introduced new institutional forms and played an active role in the local growth coalition. They have set standards around work intensity, training, and job ladders. Highlighting the ability of the union to affect these issues contributes to a counter-narrative about the City which stresses the agency of labour to actively produce Las Vegas’ cultural and economic landscapes. The postmodern narrative about Las Vegas hides these important lessons. Learning from Las Vegas can transform issues of signs and symbolism to issues of union organising and institutional structures in the post-industrial economy.

The Economic Geography of Innovation: Theorizing the gendered institutional bases of innovative regional economies

Introduction During the past two decades, scholars and policymakers have debated how best to promote and harness innovation in regional economies. Much of the resulting regional literature focuses on creating conditions conducive to knowledge creation, information dissemination, entrepreneurship, and learning. However, although this literature extensively documents the formal interactions that underpin innovative regional economies, it is less satisfying in its treatment of the informal socioinstitutional bases. Critically, we still do not fully understand how distinctive patterns of social relations reinforce more formal interactions within these regions, and hence how they contribute to economic performance. Although many analysts typically suggest something intangible that permits innovation to proceed in some places but not in others, they often fail to specify the exact nature of the processes through which key sociorelational structures promote innovative activity more successfully in some regions than in others. One major component of this problem is a dominant tendency within the regional learning and innovation literature to treat elite workers as an homogeneous group with little differentiation across gender, race, or cultural background. Although scholars argue that collective learning and innovation processes are enhanced by a shared social environment that supports interaction (e.g. Lorenz 1992; Keeble and Wilkinson 1999), this shared social environment is too often conceptualized as implicitly masculine, and hence distinctive patterns of female work and social interaction are sidelined.

The double crisis: in what sense a regional problem?

ABSTRACT We are now facing Andrew Sayer’s ‘diabolical double crisis’, which encompasses both a deep financial crisis and an environmental one. The scale, scope and nature of this double crisis is downplayed in the regional studies literature, much of which still focuses on innovative growth models often divorced from broader social and ecological contexts. To help solve both crises we call for regional studies to explore new models that allow a focus to be made on the most important issues of our time. We illustrate this by focusing on the contradictions in the waste produced by contemporary regional economies: waste of abundance, labour and resources.