Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ronments might evolve gradually, and in relatively predictable ways, as institutional
relationships and regulations are developed and applied, and as technology moves
along established trajectories. Those environments might also change rapidly and in less
predictable ways, perhaps as a result of radical technological innovation, radical policy
shifts, or following the opening of trade and competition between formerly autarkic
regions. Signii cant change in the characteristics of a selection environment may give
rise to a thoroughgoing rearrangement of the ei ciency of individual business units and
to more or less intense selective pressure that heralds further change in the nature of
that environment. Such changes will have a clear spatial expression if the remapping of
ei ciency favors the economic agents and institutions of one region over another. These
points should make clear that ei ciency is relative and always dei ned in the context of
a selection environment that is produced, at least in part, by the actions of political and
economic agents.
The evolutionary arguments above have considerably enriched our understanding of
the regional dimensions of competition. Regions, like plants and i rms, may be char-
acterized by their variety in terms of technological, organizational, and institutional
characteristics. And, as in the economy more generally, technological progress and eco-
nomic change at the regional level are shaped by the competitive processes that create
and destroy variation and that select certain techniques, institutions and organizational
forms over others. While these competitive pressures manifest themselves in various
product markets and in the dif erential performance of plants, it would be wrong to view
the performance of regions as nothing more than the performance of the business units
that they contain. Stripped of their association with the social and institutional fabric
that dei nes the familiar political-economy of a home space/local selection environment,
even the most competitive plants might wither. With or without common histories of
practice, once populations of plants become isolated, over time they will tend to develop
dif erent characteristics and exhibit increasingly distinct histories of development. These
histories will shape the selection environment in which those plants are located, produc-
ing and reproducing regions with characteristics that emerge from the interplay of the
forces of capitalist competition as well as from other social pressures.
It is clear today, as production becomes increasingly fragmented, that i rms are paying
more attention than ever to the characteristics of particular places as they search for
more attractive sites of accumulation. This fragmentation of production is, at the same
time, integrating regions across the world economy. This integration implies signii cant
changes in the selection environments within which plants compete. Regions are no
longer simple repositories of independent plants, other economic agents and local insti-
tutional forces that can be interpreted as the containers within which competition works
itself out. Rather, regions might be more accurately conceived as evolving bundles of
attributes, some place-specii c, others exotic, rel ecting the inconstant population of
economic agents in the region and the routines they have acquired through intra-i rm
and inter-i rm networks that span multiple spaces. In this more complex environment,
the processes of selection, of variety creation and destruction still function, though it is
a much more dii cult task to show how they can be geographically isolated to account
for the uneven development of regions. Indeed, individual plants now appear to be
competing across a hierarchy of relatively unstable selection environments that span
local, national and even global spaces. In some respects, perhaps, we might conceive of
