Nick Henry

Spatialising knowledge: placing the knowledge community of Motor Sport Valley

Abstract Within the contemporary world of ‘the knowledge economy’, understanding the spatial organisation of knowledge production has become a key issue. Drawing on recent emphases in economic geography on the cultural construction and social embeddedness of economic success, this paper outlines an attempt to understand one form of spatial organisation of knowledge – the agglomeration or cluster – using the analytical concept of ‘the knowledge community’. Using the example of Motor Sport Valley, the paper provides an empirical and methodological example of how one might place a knowledge community. The British motor sport industry dominates its world of production with a regional agglomeration, Motor Sport Valley, centred on Oxfordshire and stretching into East Anglia and down into Surrey. The paper provides empirical demonstration of the processes of knowledge generation and dissemination constituting the space (and knowledge community) of Motor Sport Valley. The paper recognises also the need to contextualise the ‘microfoundations’ of knowledge communities within a greater political economic system.

Neo-Marshallian Nodes, Institutional Thickness, and Britain's ‘Motor Sport Valley’: Thick or Thin?

The authors consider the insights into the concept of institutional thickness provided by the industrial cluster located in southern England commonly referred to as ‘Motor Sport Valley’. It is argued that, although Amin and Thrifts original formulation of the concept of institutional thickness was comprehensive in scope, subsequent debate has focused around a somewhat restricted definition—essentially that of overt regionally based public, or quasi-public, institutions. The success of Motor Sport Valley in the absence of such infrastructure points to other sources of institutional strength and highlights the fact that all economic systems are constituted and mediated through a variety of types of institutional structure. The crucial issue when considering economic development, therefore, is not whether economically successful regions contain sources of institutional thickness, but rather the precise nature of the institutions in the area (and those influencing it from the outside) and their relationship with economic growth.

Globalization from below: Birmingham - postcolonial workshop of the world?

Birmingham is re-inventing itself through a strategy of prestige city centre regeneration. Drawing on the theoretical lenses of transnationalism and postcolonialism, we sketch one alternative vision of Birmingham’s economic place in the world. Through a focus on ‘ethnic diversity’, and the subsequent distinctiveness of the city’s economy, this paper re-visions Birmingham as a ‘global’ city. Reflecting on a ‘politics of scale’ (Swyngedouw, 2000), we highlight a ‘globalisation from below’ that draws on the city’s residents and their histories.

Discursive Aspects of Technological Innovation: The Case of the British Motor-Sport Industry:

A discursive approach to technological innovation recognises that scientific and technical innovations are the products of groups of people. The subject of this paper is how this insight from the sociology of scientific knowledge can make a contribution to debates in economic geography. Principally drawing on the work of social constructionists, this approach is used to provide insights into the reasons for both the creation and the maintenance of the geographical agglomeration of small firms constituted by the British motor-sport industry.

Knowledge and clusters

Clusters and Globalisation brings together scholars with different perspectives and theoretical groundings, and from different disciplines, to consider conceptual arguments and case study material. In doing so the volume identifies key characteristics and requirements of the forms of cluster that are especially significant for the attainment of economic success in a globalising world.

Competitive time-space in high technology

The ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’—the growth of R&D based high technology industry in Cambridge during the 1980s—is an economic success story of the new times. As a study of the work organisation of the scientist/engineers of Cambridge, this paper reveals the extreme time-space flexibility experienced by these workers. It reveals also how this flexible use of time and space is essential in the internationally competitive success of high technology industry in Cambridge. The paper ends with a critical look ahead at some of the implications and contradictions of this particular form of growth both for the economy and this set of elite workers.

Banking on exclusion: Data disclosure and geographies of UK personal lending markets

In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes three contributions to debates about financial exclusion. First, it provides the first exploratory spatial analysis of the personal lending data made available; it scrutinises the parameters and robustness of the dataset and evaluates the extent to which the data increase transparency in UK personal lending markets. Second, it uses the data to provide a geographical overview of patterns of personal lending across Great Britain. Third, it uses this analysis to revisit the analytical and political limitations of ‘open data’ in addressing the relationship between access to finance and economic marginalisation. Although a binary policy imaginary of ‘inclusion-exclusion’ has historically driven advocacy for data disclosure, recent literatures on financial exclusion generate the need for more complex and variegated understandings of economic marginalisation. The paper questions the relationship between transparency and data disclosure, the policy push for financial inclusion, and patterns of indebtedness and economic marginalisation in a world where ‘fringe finance’ has become mainstream. Drawing on these literatures, this analysis suggests that data disclosure, and the transparency it affords, is a necessary but not sufficient tool in understanding the distributional implications of variegated access to credit.

Coming Through The Field

The final tier within our Global Starting Grid of 16 is the five countries or global regions Coming Through the Field—Malaysia, the Gulf Region, China, Turkey and the Czech Republic. In the main, this is a set of newcomers to the world of motorsport, and the critical issue is whether these truly represent new regions of growth for the global industry.

Frontrunners on the Global Starting Grid

Part One outlined the Global Starting Grid of international motorsport and identified the six global frontrunners as the USA, UK, Japan, Germany, Italy and France. These nations have dominated the economic development and racing history of motorsport. The frontrunners account for 75 percent of the world market, 91 percent (20) of the global chassis constructors, virtually all of the supply chain of the vehicles racing in the global series and 41 percent (23) of the global racing events.

The Global Motorsport Business

Part One introduces our understanding of the global motorsport business: what it is comprised of, how to analyze it and how to measure it. We outline motorsport as an economic sector comprising both an engineering industry and the business of sport. The dynamic complexity of the sector and its economic relationships are captured within the concept of the Motorsport Value Chain. Part One ends with a current overview of the global motorsport industry. The value chain heuristic is then applied throughout the remainder of the book to benchmark the Global Starting Grid of national motorsport industries.