ABSTRACT
The question of culture has represented an enduring challenge for regional development theories, and has had difficulties in progressing beyond Granovetter’s overdetermination dilemma (1985). The issue in operationalising regional culture as an economic development variable is that it refers indirectly to particular regional groups’ characteristics and capacities (Keating et al. 2003; Kotey 2006). Even in restricting ‘culture’ to characteristics that are related to economic behaviours (entrepreneurial cultures, innovative cultures, thrifty cultures), the problem with the idea of a regional culture is that behavioural tendencies become woven into regional structure through structuration processes (Boschma 2005). New culturally inflected concepts such as social capital and absorptive capacity attempt to explain relationships between individual behaviours, middle-range institutions and regional collectivities (Hansson et al. 2005; Kallio et al. 2010; Van Reine and Dankbaar 2011).
