ABSTRACT
The shift to knowledge-intensive capitalism goes beyond the particular business and management strategies of individual firms ... involving] the development of new inputs and a broader infrastructure at the regional level ... The nature of this economic transformation makes regions key economic units in the global economy. In essence, globalism and regionalism are part of the same process of economic transformation (Richard Florida, 1995a: 531). The dogma that 'regions are resurgent' as a result of global transformations implied by the growth of 'informational economies' has almost reached the point of an orthodoxy. But like the fashion for postfordism which preceded it, this represents the triumph of fashion and the influence of academic authority figures over social science. Treating these claims as accounts of the key causal influences on real regional development in general has led the New Regionalists to overlook far more important influences on the economic dynamics of many, and probably most, real world regions (John Lovering, 1999: 386).
