Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
marked by larger factories, capital concentration and the development of the joint stock
company. Geographically, in the UK, it also led to the growth of large towns particularly
around coali elds. The third wave, based on innovations in electricity and automobiles,
produced the giant factories of 'Fordism', cartels and the growth in the signii cance of
i nance capitalism. Geographical results included the forming of large conurbations and
the embryonic development of the international economy. The fourth wave was driven
by innovations in computing and communications and characterised by a mixture of
large 'Fordist' and small subcontracting factories combined with the emergence of large
multinational companies. Geographically it drove suburbanisation, deurbanisation and
the establishment of new industrial regions such as Silicon Valley. It was also associated
with a growing international division of labour (Hall and Preston, 1988).
As part of this fourth major paradigm shift it has been argued that the advanced econ-
omies are in the throes of an accelerated transition from 'industrial' to 'post-industrial'
capitalism. This acceleration was recognised by scholars such as Daniel Bell (1973) in his
seminal work on 'The Coming of Post-industrial Society', on the cover of the Penguin
edition of which is scrawled 'knowledge rules O.K.'. Bell himself later changed the title
to the 'information society' for which concept he is generally regarded as the origina-
tor.
The information society is characterised by:
The expansion and dominance of service sectors in advanced economies.
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The new technological paradigm based on the production, processing, communi-
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cation and consumption of information.
New information and communication enabling technologies, a growing wave of
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globalisation and the consequential signii cance of the international economy.
An important task for evolutionary economic geography is therefore to describe, typify
and explain the spatial emergence and evolution of the knowledge-driven information
society. In principle, evolutionary models attempt to make such explanations in terms of
the geographical patterns of industries and the ways in which they acquire and exploit
knowledge in conditions of uncertainty and bounded rationality. These analyses at the
level of i rms and industries can be built into an explanation of the spatial evolution of
an economic system as a whole in terms of a multi-sector framework of structural change
and networks located in space (Boschma and Frenken, 2006; Dosi and Soete, 1988; Hall
and Preston, 1988; Hohenberg and Lees, 1995; Pasinetti, 1993).
6. The information economy and the spatial division of labour
Information is a key evolutionary dynamic:
Information about new scientii c developments, information regarding the success or failure of
R&D projects to guide the next round of R&D decisions, information regarding the character-
istics of new products to guide potential purchasers, information regarding costs of production
and purchases to guide producers, information about proi ts to guide investors. (Nelson and
Winter 1982, p. 29)
All these are critical inputs to the evolutionary processes of routines, search and
selection.
