ABSTRACT

Within economic geography and regional studies there are a plethora of theoretical approaches and perspectives that seek to explain the relationship between knowledge and space, and its importance to economic development and growth. Just a few examples include the popular ‘cluster’ theories of Michael Porter (1990, 2000), the theories of the California School concerning transaction costs and networks of small producers (Storper and Scott 1995), and the work of researchers on national or regional systems of innovation (Lundvall 1992; Cooke 1998). There are at least two characteristics that these, and other, theories have in common. First, they have all been criticised in both theoretical and empirical terms (e.g. Lovering 1999; Lagendijk and Cornford 2000; Malmberg and Power 2005). Second, they have a tendency to conflate theoretical description with policy prescription – that is, there are ‘clusters’ of successful industries, therefore in order to be successful, industries need to cluster. Anthony Giddens termed such tendencies in social science the ‘double hermeneutic’ in which concepts become self-fulfilling because they are considered an accurate description of the world and are therefore acted upon in policy and theory (see Ferraro et al. 2005; Ghoshal 2005). Consequently, such concepts can become self-reinforcing, leading to the promotion and maintenance of specific theories that constitute the world in particular ways.