empirical evidence, this work demonstrates how
the strategies and practices of even large firms
are shaped by (and embedded within) the various
divergent national institutional frameworks in
which they operate.
How do these insights help us navigate our
way through the recent debate on the role of the
local and the ability of knowledge to ‘travel’?
According to this view, institutional context –
and notgeographical proximity per seor the
availability of information technology – acts to
define the conditions under which knowledge
can actually be translated and transferred from
one locale to another. In other words, physical
proximity is not the real source of ‘thickness’ in
relationships, nor can this strength be guaranteed
by the availability of information technologies
designed to substitute for actual collocation.
Instead, the bedrock preconditions on which
strong relationships and shared understandings
develop is institutional affinity or similarity.
When firms (or individual workers) operate
according to a common set of norms, routines,
conventions and assumptions about the way the
economic world works (what we might call a
common culture), they are more likely to share
those understandings that promote knowledge
flow effectively between them, no matter what
the intervening physical distance. But these very
routines, norms, conventions and assumptions are
themselves strongly influenced by the institutional
structures that delimit how labour and financial
markets operate, how corporate governance,
employment relations and work are organized,
and how competition and inter-firm relations
develop.^13 In other words, a more complete
theory of the firm and the role of regional culture
needs to be set within a wider matrix of institu-
tional forces and processes that influence (but do
not fully determine) their actions. In my view,
neither the new cultural economic geography
literature norits critics have grasped the sig-
nificance of this basic insight. For this reason,
the debate remains pitched at a distressingly
superficial level of analysis.LIFE AFTER CULTURE: WHAT
COMES NEXT?The preceding discussion has, I believe, demon-
strated that economic geographers live in inter-
esting times, even if they can’t quite reach
consensus on some of the most fundamental
questions confronting them today. On questions
like ‘When is proximity important, and why?’,
‘How easily does tacit knowledge flow betweenplaces, and how is it produced in the first place?’,
a culturally informed analysis has taken us into
some interesting new terrain, even as it raises
many unanswered questions. We now under-
stand production to be imbued with cultural
processes and forces emanating from the region,
the nation-state and the firm.
One may well ask, however, whether the gains
achieved from taking this turn have fulfilled the
promise expected. In particular, the interest in
cultural aspects of production in the economy
may have diverted attention away from some of
the older, but still pressing, ‘core questions’
within the economic realm. While it may be true,
as Thrift has argued, that earlier work on these
topics ‘had lost any sparkle of innovation’
(2000a: 692), others contend that there remain
‘immensely real substantive issues and purposive
human practices that have always been and still
are fundamentally at stake’ (Scott, 2000: 34).
Where do we go from here? In this concluding
section, I comment on the continuing relevance
of some of these ‘real issues’ and suggest some
possibly fruitful ways forward.Cooperation or conflict?To begin with, the overriding interest in innova-
tion, knowledge and learning in today’s cultural
economic geography is undoubtedly well justi-
fied, for reasons that are evident in the preceding
discussion.^14 However, we seem to have intro-
duced some topical blinders and biases in the
process, leaving behind some questions of
immense importance that once occupied us all
quite a bit.^15 For instance, within the field of inno-
vation studies itself, we have probably all been
guilty of overemphasizing cooperation and col-
laboration between firms, and downplaying older
themes like competition and conflict. In a recent
paper, Malmberg and Maskell (2002) point out
that the true essence distinguishing many local
and regional clusters may not in fact be coopera-
tion and culturally grounded harmony but, rather,
intense rivalry, competition, observation, spying
and other forms of anti-social behaviour. Their
point is that this kind of activity is also fostered
by spatial concentration, and is capable of confer-
ring real benefits on the firms involved.
This point may be more profound than it
appears at first blush. Consider the case of one
of the world’s paradigmatic clusters – Silicon
Valley. In her landmark study, Saxenian (1994)
was at pains to challenge the then-prevailing rep-
resentation of the Valley as the creation of gifted
and daring entrepreneurs working more or less
in isolation from one another. Her take was140 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch06.qxd 03-10-02 10:40 AM Page 140