Although the future is an increasingly important topic for regional economic development, our knowledge of the future as a research subject has been limited. Following futures studies, we develop a ...perspective on a specific version of regional futures research based on critical realism. We believe that discussing regional futures could be a promising “boundary object” for scholars taking different approaches. Moreover, we argue that economic geographers’ ability to engage with the future in meaningful ways is as important as their ability to engage with the past and present if the discipline is to retain its relevance in the future.
Although co-evolution is a key concept in contemporary economic geography because of its relevance for achieving deep contextualization and sound policy recommendations, it has not largely been taken ...up in recent empirical work. This is partly due to the lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework. This paper develops such a framework in which two key issues are stressed: the multi-scalarity of co-evolving populations and the nature of change. Moreover, an agenda is set for more theoretically informed future research on co-evolution.
While economic geography has provided great insights in regional industrial development, knowledge is limited concerning how a contested local industry can be legitimized and who contributes to such ...legitimation process. The aim of this paper is to investigate the legitimation trajectory of a contested creative industry in Hamburg—the video games industry. The central argument is that the controversies of the focal industry mainly come from four aspects—the product ontologies, the boundary beliefs, the industry recipes, and the reputational rankings. These dimensions combined have led to dynamic societal evaluations of the industry over time. Moreover, the main stigmata related to the aforementioned dimensions may lie at different spatial scales, and thus require the differentiated legitimation efforts of actors at different levels. Overall, it is argued that in normalizing a contested industry in a region, the legitimation process is not merely a local phenomenon, but global referencing and national legitimation are crucial, as well.
Over the last fifteen years, we have been observing an increasing fragmentation of economic geography, concerning both schools of thought, perspectives, paradigms, themes and the educational ...background of researchers. The poly-vocal character of economic geography includes a variety of language areas, a phenomenon so far unknown to a large part of Anglo-American economic geographers. Particularly in the literature about theories, perspectives and paradigms, the non-English speaking world is largely ignored as a basis for debate. Even worse, leading scholars in the field increasingly use the term Anglo-American economic geography to refer to the whole field, although they describe trends and theories in both general and authoritative terms. The aim of this paper is to move beyond Anglo-American economic geography by introducing and reviewing economic geography literature in some other main languages, namely Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. The purpose of doing so is not merely to show that there is more than Anglo-American economic geography, but also to derive from these non-English voices insights in how to move to an integrative paradigm of a truly international economic geography.
While economic geography has contributed deep insights into the knowledge-related determinants of industry emergence, less is known about the legitimacy that people confer to the new industries. ...Based on a comparative case study in the potable water reuse industry (California, United States) and the video games industry (Hamburg, Germany), this article explores the legitimation dynamics in regional industrial path development. We elaborate on how system-building/reconfiguration and institutional work processes differ between industries that are new-to-the-world versus new-to-the-region. Our framework contributes to specifying the embedded agency that supports legitimation and thus path development in these two distinct industry formation trajectories.
Millimeter wave with large bandwidth, high transmission rate, and low delay is considered a reliable alternative to cope with the spectrum shortage. However, the fast attenuation and narrow beam ...characteristics make it difficult to achieve long-distance or wide-range applications. Here, a 1-bit dual-band reflective reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) for signal enhancement in millimeter wave with 16×16 elements is designed, fabricated, and measured. Different from most existent RIS, dynamic programming is realized at two separate frequency bands by integrating the PIN diodes and field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Particularly, the beam deflection, dual-beam, and multi-beam are created based on the coding theory and convolution operation, proving the effectiveness of wavefront manipulation. Moreover, the far-field patterns and signal power with different coding sequences are measured and compared. It is indicated that the received signal power is 6–7 dB stronger than that without coding, which shows good agreement with the desired expectations. The proposed reconfigurable metasurface exhibits great potential in beam forming, making it a promising candidate for progressive wireless communication applications.
During the last decades, a large body of literature has been published on the clustering of creative industries, but it has not been reviewed in a systematic way. In this review paper, we fill this ...gap. The review leads to the identification of several deficiencies of current research. Based on that, we distil avenues for future empirical research on the drivers of the clustering of creative industries, which are embedded in a comprehensive analytical framework.
Abstract
Drawing upon critical realism and the literature on theorising in social sciences, this article contributes to the understanding of theorising in economic geography by highlighting the role ...of context throughout the theory development process. By critically reviewing two key concepts in economic geography—related variety and knowledge bases—from a critical realist theory development perspective, scholars’ sensitivity to local context through the whole theorising process is examined. We argue that the particular strength of economic geography with regard to advancing theory lies in the continuous application of concepts and theories (that is, generalities) within new contexts (that is, confrontation with new particularities).
While broad evidence has been generated on the forces leading to divergent regional industrial path development, we still do not fully understand how initial structural differences between regions ...are dynamically attenuated in industrial path development processes. In other words, the cumulative causation processes instigating such differences are not well explored. In this paper, a process model is developed, which conceptualizes industrial path development as an iterative build-up of innovation system resources, which is conditioned by firm- and system-level agency. We argue that the specific configuration of system resource stocks, as well as firm- and system-level agency jointly condition the further evolution of a path each time a regional industry reaches a “critical moment”. Unpacking the cumulative system building process across development phases allows exploring how positive or negative cumulative causation patterns emerge in the path development process and how early interventions in the system building process may have knock-on effects at later stages.
In our recent article, we discussed the state of the art of economic geography. We observed an increasing fragmentation over the last fifteen years, concerning schools of thought, perspectives, ...paradigms, themes and the educational background of researchers.
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