ABSTRACT
The context of, and focus of concern in, this chapter is the recent growing interest in – one might almost say obsession with – ‘learning’ and ‘knowledge’ as a route, perhaps the only route, to corporate and regional economic success. This is one facet of the growing, and generally productive, engagement between economic geographers and regional analysts on the one hand and evolutionary and institutional economists on the other (see, for example, Maskell et al., 1998; Storper, 1997). This focus on knowledge, and the processes through which it is transmitted, is often presented as a dramatic new breakthrough, of epochal significance, promising radical theoretical reappraisal and opening up new possibilities for the conception, implementation and practice of policy (see, for example, Braczyk et al., 1998). It would of course be futile to deny the significance of knowledge, innovation and learning to economic performance. Production as a process that simultaneously involves materials transformation, human labour and value creation, necessarily depends upon the knowledge and skills of individual workers and on the collective knowledge of a range of social and technical conditions and processes that make production possible. This also directs attention to the institutional bases of knowledge production and dissemination, recognizing that these are social processes and ‘instituted processes’ of a Polyanian type. Competitiveness and economic success are thus seen to be grounded in a variety of types of knowledge and knowing.
