Cultural Geography

The knowledge foundations of regional

cultures of production and innovation

As outlined in the previous section, the new

cultural economic geography of production

asserts a clear role for the local – a generally

counterintuitive result in the supposed age of the

global information economy. This idea has

become something of a badge of honour amongst

economic geographers, who now regularly

delight in disabusing their spatially challenged

colleagues in other disciplines of simplistic ideas

about ‘the end of geography’ (O’Brien, 1992),

‘the death of distance’ (Cairncross, 1997) or ‘the

end of the city as we knew it’ (Mitchell, 1995).

Besides the satisfaction of scoring points with

one’s economist friends, it is comforting to be

reassured that ‘geography matters’. Moreover,

the political possibilities associated with this

position defy the stifling determinism of the

‘global economy’ view of the world, in that local

politics are at least open to contestation by local

stakeholders.^6 And yet, just when it appears that

all is right with the world, along comes some

unsettling little complications. It turns out that

the conceptual foundations for arguments pro-

moting the primacy of the local – particularly as

they concern the knowledge and behaviour of the

firm, arguably the principal actor within capitalist

production systems – may not be as solid or

clearly articulated as they should be.

The problems begin with the concept of tacit

knowledge and its relationship to the local. In

much of the recent literature on regional cultures

of production, the distinction between tacit

(‘know how’) and codified (‘know that’) knowl-

edge emerges as central. The touchstone for this

distinction is Michael Polanyi’s oft-quoted

phrase that ‘we can know more than we can tell’

(1966: 4) – alluding to a form of knowledge that

is ‘imperfectly accessible to conscious thought’

(Nelson and Winter, 1982: 79). Underlying this

is a deeper distinction between forms of knowl-

edge (explicit or codified) that can be effectively

expressed and shared using symbolic forms of

representation and other forms of knowledge

(tacit) that defy such representation. Hence, the

tacit component of the knowledge required for

successful performance of a skill defies codifica-

tion or articulation either because the performer

herself is not fully conscious of all the ‘secrets’

of successful performance, or because the codes

of language are not well enough developed or

sufficiently universal to permit explication and

translation.

To show why the concept of tacit knowledge

is so important to the question of local cultures of

production requires a bit of a digression into the

theory of the firm. Recently fashionable theories

of the firm draw their inspiration from the pio-

neering (and long-neglected) work of Edith

Penrose (1959). This approach has been labelled

the competence- or resource-based theory of the

firm because it emphasizes the importance of the

competences, capabilities or resources of indi-

vidual workers and managers within the firm, as

well as the larger collectivity of customs, proce-

dures, routines and practices that define the firm.

It is the collective or social aspect of this capa-

bility which is most interesting, but also the most

difficult to grasp fully when trying to understand

why firms behave the way they do. According to

this view, individuals bring to the firm a set of

attributes and competences based on their formal

education and broader socio-economic back-

ground, as well as their prior work experiences.

But the firm’s capabilities are constituted by

more than the simple sum of its individual

employees’ capabilities. Every firmhas a unique

set of organizational structures, relationships,

rules and routines (explicit and implicit) that help

coordinate the actions of individuals inside the

firm in order to achieve purposive goals – both

the day-to-day objectives entailed in successful

production and the longer-term goals set forth in

a firm’s broader strategy (Kay, 1993).

These features, together with the common

learning experiences of workers within the firm,

also serve as a means for enabling the social pro-

duction and sharing of knowledge, through the

creation of a distinctive ‘knowledge context’ or

framework. As Howells puts it, ‘What indivi-

duals within the firm know and can achieve

depends in part on the nature and characteristics

of the firm’s context’ (2000: 55). Common codes

of communication are essential to this process,

since one of the principal challenges confronting

the firm is how to absorb, share and transform

both codified and tacit knowledge throughout the

organization. In the absence of shared codes

of communication, the transmission of this

knowledge – that is, learning processes within the

firm –will be impeded. Once again quoting from

Howells, who acknowledges the work of

Metcalfe and De Liso (1998):

The tacitness of much knowledge, its indivisibility in

use, the uncertainty of its values in different contexts,

its proprietary nature, and the fact that much of what is

known is jointly produced by the firm’s activities ...

means that the firm provides a central contextual role in

harnessing knowledge to produce new innovative

capabilities. (2000: 56)

Hence we can now see that, according to the

resource- or competence-based view, the

firm’s primary purpose is to absorb, share and

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