Phil Cooke
Cardiff University
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Review of Social Economy | 2007
Phil Cooke
Abstract This article presents results of a research project examining the effects of social capital on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance. The first main part of the article is a review of literature of relevance to the study. The second part reports the main quantitative results of research on the role of social capital in SME markets in the UK. It compares SME performance and social capital usage across UK regions, with samples stratified according to degrees of knowledge intensiveness of firms and economic status of their area. It shows, perhaps surprisingly, that for many SMEs the “market” is more or less wholly constituted by social capital. The third main part of the article investigates in depth a number of representative and illustrative cases of SMEs deploying social capital in distinctive ways within markets. It shows that without social networks most firms cannot function in markets. It shows high performance firms to be the most intensive users of social capital. This research on social capital underlines the distorted nature of mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory by demonstrating “relational embeddedness” to be an important indicator of SME performance.
Policy Studies | 2011
Phil Cooke; Lisa De Propris
The argument developed in this paper is that a resilient economy requires a growth agenda that is underpinned by a balanced industrial mix, the development and adoption of new knowledge or technological platforms, and risk taking in radical and incremental innovations as well as in soft and hard innovations. In other words, it is desirable to promote a sustainable and endogenous way to ‘reset’ the economy – borrowing the phrase from this study by Florida – by endorsing a growth agenda that includes also creative and cultural industries. It will further be argued that a policy agenda for the EUs economic growth takes little account of the opportunities and potential of creative and cultural industries, favouring hard technologies and services. A growing literature is starting to highlight the innovation capacity of cultural and creative industries as they intersect the innovation processes of other manufacturing and services sectors with innovative and creative outputs. The indecision of EU policy-makers on how to take advantage of creative and cultural industries for the delivery of a Smart Europe – as part of the Europe 2020 agenda – translates into a lack of commitment to such industries and indeed to a clear cohesion agenda. We make a strong case for EU policy-making to break the deadlock and clearly spell out a policy agenda that has an effective spatial dimension and that directly interfaces with its innovation policy.
European Planning Studies | 2010
Phil Cooke
This book is based on the author’s period as Conference Board of Canada Scholar in Residence, which culminated in a public lecture. The lecture, suitably written up, forms the core of the book, which ends with the text of the comments from notable panellists invited to make their observations and ask questions arising from the lecture. The core of the book, which reports on the findings of a large research programme on creative and innovative industry in Canadian city regions, is clearly articulated in the book’s foreword by Anne Golden, President & CEO of the Conference Board, as follows. In strategizing city-region growth “Should reliance be placed on urban specialisation—as Harvard professor Michael Porter claims? . . . Or should we trust in diversity—as the late urban expert Jane Jacobs believed?” Readers of this journal will be familiar with this hot theoretical topic, which focuses on many urban economic concepts ranging from the hoary old “localization” versus “urban” externalities dichotomy to the more recent literature on “knowledge spillovers”, “absorptive capacity” and “path dependence”. For a time economists, especially, favoured the “view” (MAR) of an imagined if improbable power alliance involving the long-dead Alfred Marshall, the happily still alive Kenneth Arrow and Paul Romer, the younger progenitor of the “neoclassical endogenous growth theory” that once helped make the pronouncements of UK Prime Minister Brown somewhat risible even when he was chancellor. This “view” is the line from which spring Porter and another Harvard urban economist Ed Glaeser. Porter, of course, espouses “clusters” while Glaeser claims, despite much evidence to the contrary, that specialized labour markets promote most urban growth. Against these eminent names stood, for many decades, Jane Jacobs, the lone advocate of the view that variety was the superior condition for urban prosperity and that large cities supplied precisely that quality. Hence, we got the juxtaposition of MAR spillovers (or externalities) and Jacobian ones for a period which saw a great rise in publications of articles on the topic, mainly in the first decade of this millennium. More recently, some relief has been brought from empirical research by evolutionary economic geographers, many of whom made contributions to this journal, showing that urban growth was stronger in localities with “related variety” in their economies. This, of course, appears to vindicate Jacobs as well as fitting well with ideas about networks, interactive learning and innovation more generally. Contrariwise, relatively little is heard nowadays about the virtues of specialization, especially over-specialization in the kind of financial innovations that brought the global economy to its knees 2007–2009. European Planning Studies Vol. 18, No. 10, October 2010
International Journal of Technology Management | 2007
Phil Cooke
New international trade theory postulates intra-industry trade as a major component. Regarding research as a traded item, this is complex as it can be both intra- and inter-industry trade, a problem for future industry classifications. However, research trade from university centres of excellence and research institutes is now a major feature of territorial competition. The example of this to be discussed, mainly theoretically, but with supporting evidence, relates to intra-factor translocation by transnational corporations (TNCs) in pharmaceutical and agro-food biotechnology. Whereas the prime mover in spatial structure became the TNC and its internal and international divisions of labour that created economic geography to a large extent, this had declined significantly by 2004 in pharmaceuticals though less so in agro-food. Now, in biopharmaceuticals, the prime mover is the key university, its research capabilities, specialist fund-attracting Centres of Excellence, and entrepreneurship in dedicated biot...
European Planning Studies | 2009
Phil Cooke
This article focuses on future-oriented knowledge within regional innovation networks. Concrete regional tools and institutional settings aiming to enhance knowledge creation and management in such networks are needed. To enable planning for the future, there is a need for regional visionary capability. Resource-based futures research may make an important contribution in reducing the insecurity that regions face in the turbulent environment. When foresight processes are not absorbed into the regional strategy making processes, ‘black holes of regional strategy making’ come into existence, and future scenarios are built without taking into consideration the path-dependency of a region. This article attempts to reduce the gap between futures research, on the one hand, and regional knowledge and innovation management, on the other hand. It highlights the concept of selftranscending knowledge—the ability to sense the presence of potential. It then introduces a new, systemic model for knowledge creation and management in regional innovation networks. Utilising methods from futures research in creating self-transcending knowledge in a regional knowledge management system is proposed as a fruitful way of enhancing regional visionary capability. The article thus advocates combining approaches and methodologies from futures research with those of knowledge management in a novel way. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 0016-3287/
European Planning Studies | 2013
Phil Cooke
see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2005.01.001 Futures 37 (2005) 849–866 www.elsevier.com/locate/futures * Chapters 1, 3 and 4 of the paper are partly based on a paper presented at an International Conference of Regional Studies Association (UK), 12–15 April 2003, at Pisa, Italy. * Corresponding author. Tel.: C358 3 525 000; fax: C358 3 525 0204. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T. Uotila), [email protected] (H. Melkas), vesa.harmaakorpi@ lut.fi (V. Harmaakorpi). URL: http://ltk.hut.fi. 1 Present address: Lappeenranta University of Technology, Lahti Unit, Saimaankatu 11, FI-15140 Lahti. Finland.
European Planning Studies | 2012
Phil Cooke
In the considerable range and variety of innovation systems studies carried out with a regional focus, surprisingly few have contained detailed anatomies of services innovation. One area where it might have been thought relevant to focus on this subject is knowledgeintensive business services or KIBS. As the book’s introduction, by the editors, notes KIBS has lately become a popular research focus, not least because services in general and KIBS in particular are now very important to most developed economies. KIBS especially grow fast at the firm level and at those of territorial GDP and employment. This was of course a pronounced feature of financial services in the decade up to the global crash from 2008. Equally though, such industries showed comparable rates of decline in key industry indicators. One task of the book is to better understand such volatility, but sadly it lacks a focused chapter on the fate of investment banking and its role in the Great Recession and related banking and sovereign debt (e.g. Eurozone) crises. Nevertheless, there is much else of interest in the book and a surprisingly high proportion of regional studies of KIBS reporting developments in Alsace, Catalonia, Baden-Wurttemberg, Lombardy and Veneto as well as broader studies of India and Russia. There are a number of emphases and themes pursued in the book. The main emphases are that it focuses on, first, knowledge and its management by firms and other organizations and, second, innovation and its ways of operating in relation to the principal-agent or client–supplier relationship with which service innovation has tended to be closely associated. The key themes include the extent to which the knowledge supply relationship is mainly linear or increasingly better understood as non-linear. That is, does knowledge flow mainly one-way between KIBS and the client or is the relationship more interactive? Another theme is whether services tend to be formed as standardized or customised innovations. A further one concerns the relationship between knowledge, innovation and territory. This is especially germane to the composition of value chains or as some prefer value networks in which the region’s ecosystems may be important to KIBS operations. Accordingly, the book expresses a number of aims, which include an assessment of the degree to which KIBS became autonomous in relation to the “real economy”. This is something most commentators agree had happened to a dangerous extent in the global credit crunch where the social value of such exotica as the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) squared or synthetic CDOs was widely questioned. A further aim of the book is to better understand multi-level (local and global) KIBS knowledge management relationships, especially in value networks. A yet further one involves non-customer relationships European Planning Studies Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2013
European Planning Studies | 2012
Phil Cooke
This collection is a product of work stimulated by Demyan Belayev’s Intra-European Marie Curie Fellowship in collaboration with Lusofona University Department of Geography Head, Zoltan Roca, a Portuguese speaker from Croatia. A second collection on Croatia was published in 2011. The affiliated research centre is TERCUD, the department’s Territory, Culture and Development Research Centre. Although originating from a geography/planning department, not all authors are spatial specialists. Accordingly, the bibliography ranges across many Anglophone works such as David Landes’ (1998) Wealth & Poverty of Nations to Clifford Geertz’s (1993) The Interpretation of Cultures and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. It is quite a “cultural” perspective on knowledge society issues also involving lengthy treatments of skills formation and migration— inwards and outwards. Most references are by Portuguese but many are published in English. For scholars and students pursuing teaching and research interests on contemporary issues in Portugal, this is a valuable collection. Naturally, in enquiring about the nature and extent of Portugal’s engagement with “knowledge society”, it is not comprehensive. But, in passing, it is also usefully focused on a recent EU-wide policy obsession also emanating from a “Lisbon Agenda”, namely whether Europe in general is so engaged. The first section of the book contains three chapters addressing whether or not Portugal is a knowledge-based economy. Amaral concludes, interestingly, that membership of the euro-zone hinders growth in general, including in the knowledge sectors. Reducing public expenditure to raise “competitiveness” merely exacerbates this and diverting welfare expenditure to more “productive” investment would create “enormous social shock” because so many are dependent on public employment. Such a shock has so far been avoided, unlike the situation prevailing in Greece. A “regionalization” of Portuguese sovereignty by the EU is culturally unthinkable. Thus, harsh austerity prevails socioeconomically instead. Chorinas focuses on the contribution to a knowledge economy of “innovation clusters”. These are also part of the neo-liberal Harvard–Washington “consensus” to raise productivity by specialization in areas of “competitive advantage”. Ironically, nearly all of Portugal’s selected “technology poles” are either in low valueadded sectors or have little competitive advantage, which illustrates the banality of the cluster perspective in this context. Ferreira’s chapter is about measures taken by government to further the knowledge economy by turning an “information society” (able to absorb) into a “knowledge society” (able to create). It is remarkable that many of the initiatives designed to achieve this date from only as recently as 2009. European Planning Studies Vol. 20, No. 4, April 2012
European Planning Studies | 2011
Phil Cooke
In accounts of China’s rapid economic transformation through modern industrialization, we seldom get a firm conceptual grip on how localized that country’s astounding takeoff has been. In this book, authors Lu Li-Jun and Wang Zu-Qiang explain the crucial role in this of some 87,000 “folk markets” (comparable to pre-capitalist “county fairs” in Europe). There has also been a certain connotation of “black, informal or Shanzhai market” associated with such places of exchange. Nevertheless, they have comprised the key part of what the Chinese government formally describes, similar to “special export zones”, as “specialized markets” meaning they were outside the dominant “planned economy”. This specialized market sector, still prominent as an engine of urban and regional growth in China, is composed of a huge variety of product (and service) niches. Whereas planned economy production was typically urban in location, specialized markets were typically rural, although usually near to cities and towns—Marx’s “division of town and country” continuing to prevail even after capitalism’s overthrow in China. Some of these folk markets are themselves diversified, such as that of Yiwu in Zhejiang province, near Hanzhou, south of Shanghai, which is officially known as Yiwu Small Commodity Market. It has traditionally sold everything from “chicken feathers to candies” meaning down pillows to sweets. It is World Bank designated as the world’s largest “folk market”, in 2007, boasting 58,000 stalls, 200,000 business owners and 28 categories of commodities with an annual turnover of
European Planning Studies | 2010
Phil Cooke
7 billion of which 70% was exported. Other representative small commodities include electrical and electronic components, kitchenware, edible oils and other foodstuffs, toys and pearls. Other markets are themselves specialized, examples being specialized markets in clothing and shoes, food, tobacco and drink, furniture and motorcycles. Such markets sustained the peasantry in the planned economy era, buffering the vicissitudes of revolutionary shocks that beset the achievement of planned goals, as it now sustains the newly liberalized market economy to which China’s 5-year plans now commit the country. What happened, as in primitive capitalism everywhere, last seen by this reviewer in Poland in the 1990s, is that a person starts to sell, typically cigarettes, on a cloth, blanket or rug on the pavement, often at a crossroads. As she accumulates a little surplus, the rug gives way to a rickety table. If that phase is reasonably successful, the table is replaced with a market stall. A division of labour then evolves which creates a market for the production of market stalls. In Warsaw, this occurred early across the European Planning Studies Vol. 20, No. 10, October 2012
