ABSTRACT
This book has now evolved a sophisticated theoretical framework drawing on complementary explanatory models of socio-economic change that have either not played a significant part in developing regional innovation and development theory or are just beginning to. Thus complexity theory has been the subject of exegesis by Martin and Sunley (2010), although not from the evolutionary biological variant after Kauffman (2008) presented in Chapters 5 and 7 of this book. The same authors have further explored the ‘emergence’ dimension of evolutionary theory, but again not from the lateral perspective on innovation that is foremost in this book. Martin (2010a) has also operationalised resilience theory in the analysis of post-war UK business cycles seen as ‘shocks’ to the economy’s elsewhere imputed normal condition of ‘equilibrium’, and important findings about the industrial composition of crisis-struck regions have been made. Finally, the same authors have made major contributions to the understanding and application of the concept of ‘path dependence’ applied to regional economic development processes (Martin and Sunley, 2006, 2010). This is all a sign of the vitality, novelty, but relatively narrowly drawn community of spatial theorists of any kind, particularly evolutionary economic geography theorists, in the field (but for an exception, see Boschma and Martin, 2010; and for a wealth of empirical evolutionary economic geography findings, the work of Boschma, Frenken and colleagues in the University of Utrecht Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography series).
