Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
This chapter is intended to provide a pioneering contribution to the development
of a more precisely expressed concept of co-evolution for economic geography. First,
various general aspects of the concept of co-evolution are discussed. Second, i rms as
drivers of technical and regional economic processes, and the 'region' as facilitator of
business activity and simultaneously a point of reference for the welfare of the people
living there are used as a starting point for rel ecting about the usefulness of the concept
of co-evolution in economic geography. These have been central subjects in economic
geographical research in recent decades.
1. Evolution and co-evolution
There was a time when economic geographers believed it was only possible to explain the
present through the inl uence of long-term 'historical' factors. Thus the present state of
places and sectors was a result of the past, the geographical object a one-of event. Later,
this 'historical' perspective faded into the background for several decades in favour of
spatial and behavioural approaches that placed current factors af ecting regional devel-
opment in the foreground. For a long time geographical innovation research, which
took up on Schumpeter's ideas on technological development cycles from the early 1980s
on (e.g. Marshall, 1987), favoured a current perspective that, however, was embedded
in a temporally dimensioned order. The recently introduced evolutionary approach in
economic geography can and should take the temporal dimension of regional economic
development more seriously. But is the approach that has been discussed in hetero-
dox economics for some time really suitable for research in economic geography? The
growing debate on the theoretical concepts of evolutionary economics and the increas-
ing application of the approach in empirical studies seem to indicate that the answer is
simply 'yes'.
Central to the evolutionary economics approach is a new technology; that is, a tech-
nical artefact, and the ability to use this. The understanding in social sciences that a
technology is socially constructed poses the question of how one must think of this
process of social construction. Many neo-Schumpeterian studies in economics and the
new evolutionary economic geography are inclined to favour a 'technical' viewpoint, in
that they place the development of a new industrial sector as a new technical artefact in
the foreground (e.g. Boschma and Wenting, 2007). They thereby associate the emergence
of a new technology with the simultaneous emergence of an institutional form that cor-
responds to the capitalist model of society: the i rm. Firms, sectors and - as I will show
later - the region can be seen as specii c institutional forms that matter in the analysis
of current spatial dimensions of capitalism. In this perspective, evolution and institution
are integral dimensions of socio-technological processes. Added to that is the problem
of dif erent scales - micro, meso and macro - which has not yet been resolved (Dopfer
et al., 2004). Geographers in general see the i rm as an institutional form at the micro-
level, the region as a meso-institution and the national economy as a macro-institution.
In accordance with this scheme, the seminal work of Nelson and Winter (1982) is on a
micro-analytical scale. However, as Nelson (1995, p. 171) later shows, 'under evolution-
ary theoretic formulations of the sort that Nelson and Winter (1982) have developed,
industrial structure and technical advance interact in complex ways. It is reasonable to
say that technology and industrial structure co-evolve'. From this we can conclude, i rst,
that evolution and institution are closely intertwined, and second, that dif erent concepts
