sub-discipline in the last ten or fifteen years’ (2000a:
689). He adds, ‘there is no doubt that the
cultural turn saved economic geography from what
might otherwise have been a musty oblivion. By the
1980s, economic geography was in a pretty mori-
bund state, at risk of boring its audience to death’
(2000a: 692).
2 Just as in the economy itself, the ‘product life cycle’
of academic ideas in human geography seems to
have become dramatically shorter than ever before.
Crang attributes this ‘powerful pressure for subdis-
ciplinary reinvention’ to ‘the institutional dynamics of
a field of enquiry in which academic capital was, and
is, produced primarily through intellectual innovation
rather than loyalty to existing luminaries’ (1997: 3).
Thrift apparently agrees: ‘human geography
is a profoundly trendy subject’ (2000a: 692).
3 As Walker (2000) has so eloquently reminded us,
‘production’ is not confined to factories or the
making of physically tangible products. Large and
growing proportions of most national and regional
economies – whether measured in terms of employ-
ment or the value of output – are dedicated to the pro-
duction of services and intangible commodities.
Some of these are directly or indirectly related to the
production and consumption of tangible products;
others are produced and consumed independently. As
Walker puts it: ‘Production is making something.
That something may be as rock solid as a car, as
passing as a meal, or as shadowy as a program flick-
ering on a TV screen ... But production is, in all
cases, an act of human labor; it involves work, plain
and simple’ (2000: 113–14).
4 For a fuller, critical examination of this theme, see
Gertler (1997).
5 Most would identify the founding of this school of
thought with the publication in 1982 of Nelson and
Winter’s seminal work An Evolutionary Theory of
Economic Change. For another classic statement, see
Nelson (1995).
6 While some see a new kind of Schumpeterian neoli-
beralism emerging from the literature on local produc-
tion culture and learning regions (Jessop, 2000;
Lovering, 1999), others emphasize that a local ‘produc-
tivity’ or ‘competitiveness agenda’ can be defined
inclusively, so that rising real wages and richer employ-
ment prospects become central goals for local develop-
ment policy (Cooke and Morgan, 1998).
7 It is this emphasis on the firm as the primary pro-
ducer of competence and capability that distin-
guishes the resource-based approach from a broader
institutionalist perspective.
8 To be perfectly explicit, Allen refers to this idea as
‘ “the truth” ... [an] account of economic knowledge
[that] has the power to render itself true’ (2000: 27).
9 For a more detailed consideration of this literature,
see Gertler (2001a; 2001b).
10 See Gertler (2001b) for further commentary on this.
11 In contrast to Allen (2000), Gertler (2001b) argues that
the real problem lies not in ‘conflating’ the ideas of the
two Polanyi brothers, but in failing to understandproperly Karl Polanyi’s arguments about the
institutional foundations of economic action. Many
of the practices of managers and workers in firms
are, in fact, ‘embedded’ in (that is, influenced by)
national macro-institutional structures (shaping
behaviour in capital and labour markets, corporate
governance and inter-firm relations) of which indi-
vidual actors may remain partly or completely
unaware. Seen in this light, the notion of ‘embed-
ding’ is problematic only if it is taken to imply
necessarily local and regionalembedding. At the
same time, Michael Polanyi’s analysis of the role of
‘context’ in shaping tacit knowledge would have
benefited considerably from a closer reading of his
older sibling’s (pre-existing) work on institutions and
their ability to define the social context for human
action. Without any kind of serious institutional
analysis, Michael is compelled to develop a more
truncated, cognitive-experiential understanding of tacit-
ness,based on a performer’s lack of self-awareness
of tacitly held know-how and/or an inability to
describe or explain to others how a particular skill is
performed.
12 In a recent paper, I provide a critical review of ongo-
ing debates on international and interregional
convergence of industrial practices (Gertler, 2001a).
13 There is now a very lively debate taking shape within
the field of international political economy over the
extent to which national institutional structures
cohere to achieve system-wide ‘complementarity’
within distinctive national models (Amable, 2000).
Clark et al. (2001) raise some important questions
about the ease with which this coherence can be
achieved and sustained over time, while also arguing
that the agency of the firm needs to be more promi-
nently represented to achieve better balance in the
next generation of conceptual models.
14 Mea culpa. I have participated in this venture myself –
see Gertler and Wolfe (2002).
15 For another, much more carefully considered expres-
sion of this sentiment, see Hudson (2001).
16 This is evident in the subtitle of her book: Culture
and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128.
17 The recent works of Schoenberger (1997), Allen
(2000) and French (2000) represent important excep-
tions to this general state of affairs. As noted above,
in Schoenberger’s analysis, corporate culture is all
about the power to define the fundamental identity of
the firm. More recently, Johnson and Lundvall
(2001) have come round to the view that power rela-
tions may well play a role in the production, distrib-
ution and ownership of tacit knowledge.
18 Recalling the classic problems arising from the sepa-
ration of conception and execution in the firm’s divi-
sion of labour, one might say that the employer’s task
of identifying and appropriating the tacit knowledge
produced by their workers in doing their daily jobs
remains a principal objective and challenge in firms’
pursuit of high-quality, innovative production – what
I have elsewhere referred to as ‘the original tacit
knowledge problem’ (see Gertler, 2001b).CULTURAL ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF PRODUCTION 1433029-ch06.qxd 03-10-02 10:40 AM Page 143