Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of the workshop was that Evolutionary Economic Geography constitutes a distinctive
and promising paradigm, and that the time is ripe for a major collective statement on
the subject. While evolutionary economic geography has attracted increasing attention
(and debate) since that workshop (e.g. Boschma and Martin, 2007,
Journal of Economic
Geography
, 2007; Frenken, 2007;
Economic Geography
, 2009), there are as yet few such
comprehensive statements.
2
This topic should therefore play a formative role in inl uenc-
ing the future research agenda in this area.
The topic covers both theoretical and empirical aspects of evolutionary economic
geography. The contributions are grouped into i ve parts. The i rst set of chapters
address some key theoretical and conceptual issues in evolutionary economic geogra-
phy, with a dual focus not just on how ideas and concepts from evolutionary economics
can be brought to bear on economic-geographic issues and settings, but also on how a
geographical perspective itself has implications for our notions of economic evolution.
Against this conceptual background, the rest of the topic is concerned much more with
applying these ideas in specii c and empirical contexts. But here too, in so doing the
various chapters also make important contributions to the formulation of an evolution-
ary perspective on the economic landscape. In the second part of the topic, the focus
shifts from broad conceptual issues to the specii c case of i rm and industrial dynamics
in space. The contributions in this section explore how an evolutionary framework can
be fruitfully applied to topics in economic geography at both the micro level (like the
geography of entrepreneurship) and the meso level (like the tendency of industries to
cluster in space). Since networks play a crucial role in understanding the spatial uneven
distribution of economic activity, the third part of the topic is devoted to the nature and
spatial evolution of networks. Part 3 concentrates on how networks may be integrated
in evolutionary economic geography. The fourth part focuses on the evolution of insti-
tutions in territorial contexts and explores how institutions may be incorporated in the
explanatory framework of evolutionary economic geography. Part 5 of the topic deals
with the evolution of agglomerations and the economic landscape from an evolutionary
perspective. This introductory chapter outlines the main issues addressed in each section
of the topic, and identii es the main arguments of the various contributions.
2. The aims and conceptual foundations of evolutionary economic geography
Constructing an evolutionary economic geography, though an exciting endeavour, is by
no means a straightforward task. For one thing there is not a single, generally accepted
and commonly used body of evolutionary economics to draw on for inspiration. To be
sure, over the past two decades or so a new evolutionary economics has rapidly emerged
that seeks to understand precisely how the real economy evolves through real time (see,
for example, Arthur et al., 1997; Dopfer, 2004; Foster, 1997; Hodgson, 1993; Metcalfe,
1998; Metcalfe and Foster, 2004; Nelson and Winter, 1982; Potts, 2000; Witt, 2003,
2006). But the rush of enthusiasm to adopt an 'evolutionary perspective' has tended to
produce a plethora of self-declared approaches - a 'massive hybridisation of theory', as
Dopfer and Potts (2004, p. 195) put it - rather than a single coherent body of concepts
and methods. So to some extent, economic geographers face a still developing corpus
of ideas. Nevertheless, although the i eld of evolutionary economics is still without 'sta-
bilised shared meaning' (Klaes, 2004), and remains somewhat embryonic, some basic
principles do seem to be crystallising.
