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or rather dimensions of the institution are used. For Nelson refers in one case to the
co-evolving industry structure, which can be understood as a particular simultaneously
evolving institutional form, and the 'supporting institutions', which can be interpreted
as the regulatory systems supporting an evolutionary process, and, therefore, form part
of the changing environment of an emergent population. As plausible as this intertwine-
ment of evolution and institution seems to be, it is also highly complex given the versatil-
ity of both concepts, 'evolution' and 'institution'.
For a long time, the evolutionary approach favoured a broader systemic understand-
ing of how technologies, sectors and regions emerge. For example, various concepts of
complementarity or interrelatedness of emerging technologies and 'technology systems'
have been discussed (Carlsson and Stankiewicz, 1991; for a debate see Boschma, 1999).
They mainly focused on the emergence of generic technologies and follow-up mecha-
nisms in what became related i elds of technology (or sectors). Technology-focused as
they were, they often lacked a closer perspective on co-emerging institutional forms
(organisations). The existence of sectors ('industries') seemed to be taken for granted,
and mechanisms of technological interrelatedness were mainly seen as unidirectional
causality. More recently, a dif erent systemic understanding of evolution emerged with
the national innovation systems concept (for a recent examination see Lundvall, 2007)
and the related regional innovation systems concept (Cooke, 2004). These approaches
include societal dimensions such as the educational system, the i nancial system and so
on that foster the development of technical innovations on a national or regional scale,
but, here, the region is often taken for granted. Geographers should have a particularly
critical view of the regional systems concept, as it seems to favour the understanding of a
region as a container where things are happening; however, this chapter argues that the
region is a particular and social construct emerging with a new technology. Be that as it
may, notions such as interdependence, interrelatedness, interconnectedness or context
refer to the complexity of the subject of 'evolution', where everything seems to be con-
nected with everything else unidirectionally and/or in feedback loops. In this systemic
perspective on evolution it is dii cult to separate
particular
dimensions of co-evolution.
In short, the systemic perspective on evolution would require a totally dif erent meaning
of the 'co-' in co-evolution, as this chapter suggests.
It is surely easier to adopt a new perspective in a discipline if it takes up subjects
that are commonly examined in that discipline. In economic geography this is true of
the three institutional levels of social organisation in capitalism referred to above: the
i rm, the institutional settings of a sector and the region (Schamp, 2005). Based on a
neo-Schumpeterian understanding of evolution, these will be used to discuss the related
concept of co-evolution in economic geography as a special case in real life. Up to now,
economic geographers have used the evolutionary approach in important sub-concepts,
such as the 'lock-in' (e.g. Grabher, 1993) or path dependency (most recently Martin
and Sunley, 2006) of technical and industrial structural processes within a region. Some
publications, however, seem to be far removed from deconstructing and reconstructing
these concepts for the purposes of economic geography. They understand them more
in a metaphorical way as 'felt' evolution instead of analytical constructs (Martin and
Sunley, 2006, p. 396). An evolutionary approach thereby quickly becomes a historical
narrative and thus exactly what economic geographers already practised decades ago.
This, obviously, is not the intention of this chapter.
