Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
context and easy to transmit over time and space, and involves operating rules to
make it applicable to a wide array of environments, such as blueprints and oper-
ating manuals. As such, explicit knowledge is relatively easy to obtain and
generates comparatively little in terms of value-added. Tacit knowledge, on the
other hand, includes information that is unstandardized, changes rapidly, and is
often not written down. Tacit knowledge is heavily context-dependent and subject
to informal rules of organization that make it difficult to transmit from one situ-
ation to another, including gossip, oral histories, and invisible corporate cultures.
Much of tacit knowledge involves the symbolic manipulation of information in
ways that lead to corporate learning and innovation, a feature that makes it of great
value to firms. It tends to circulate only within narrow social and geographical
channels with a limited spatial range, and have a small degree of fungibility,
i.e., substitutability in different contexts. Expertise of this type takes years to
develop and involves the acquisition of highly specialized knowledge from diverse
sources. Often such information is collected informally, over lunches, drinks and
dinners, in the locker rooms of sports clubs, on golf courses, and through a variety
of social and cultural events.
Face-to-face contact is essential to the performance of actors in non-routine
functions. The early literature on office contact patterns (Kutay 1986 ), for exam-
ple, revealed how difficult it is to substitute electronic contacts for personal
meetings. Despite the enormous ability of telecommunications to transmit infor-
mation instantaneously over vast distances, face-to-face contact remains the most
efficient and effective means of obtaining and conveying irregular forms of
information, particularly when it is highly sensitive (or even illegal, as the current
wave of corporate malfeasance and insider trading demonstrates). Thus, in the
context of face-to-face meetings, actors monitor one another's intentions and
behavior through observations of body language, include handshakes and eye
contact, which are essential to establishing relations of trust and mutual under-
standing. Such interactions are simply not substitutable to the digital form required
by telecommunications.
Trading among markets and firms is largely managed, for example, by teams of
traders rather than individuals, groups of people, computers and buildings that
together constitute the interrelated formations that lie at the heart of actor-network
theory. Such a line of thought does not collapse the importance of regional pro-
duction systems to the socio-psychology of individuals; on the other hand, as the
literatures on flexible production and actor-network theory demonstrate, neither
can the functionality of large agglomerative complexes exist without precisely
those types of interactions. The stability of such networks allows them to become
''structural'' in the sense that they endure over time and space, reproducing the role
of these cities in the world economy.
As a sizable body of literature concerned with New York and London has
demonstrated (Fainstein 1994 ; Longcore and Rees 1996 ; Mollenkopf and Castells
1991 ), the elites of global cities rely heavily on interpersonal contacts saturated
with trust and reciprocity to ''get things done.'' Such assets are very difficult to
reproduce in other contexts, an observation that goes far to explain why the
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