Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
information that are easily transmitted from one person to another, including
quantitative data, publicly known rules and standards, and orderly records.
Explicit knowledge is designed to be as free as possible from its context and
easy to transmit over time and space, and involves operating rules to make it
applicable to a wide array of environments, such as blueprints and operating
manuals. As such, explicit knowledge is relatively easy to obtain and gener-
ates comparatively little in terms of value-added. Tacit knowledge, on the
other hand, includes information that is unstandardized, changes rapidly,
and is often not written down (Gertler 1995, 2003). Tacit knowledge is heavily
context-dependent and subject to informal rules of organization that make it
di
cult to transmit from one situation to another, including gossip, oral
histories, and invisible corporate cultures. Much tacit knowledge involves the
symbolic manipulation of information in ways that lead to corporate learn-
ing and innovation, a feature that makes it of great value to
rms. It tends to
circulate only within narrow social and geographical channels with a limited
spatial range, and to have a small degree of fungibility, i.e., substitutability in
di
fi
erent contexts. Expertise of this type takes years to develop and involves
the acquisition of highly specialized knowledge from diverse sources. Often
such information is collected informally, over lunches, drinks, and dinners, in
the locker rooms of sports clubs, on golf courses, and through a variety of
social and cultural events. Face-to-face contact and tacit knowledge is thus
essential to the performance of actors in non-routine functions. Allen (2000),
however, warns against this simple dichotomy in favor of a more subtle
gradation between the two poles.
Despite the ability of telecommunications to transmit information instant-
aneously over vast distances, face-to-face contact remains the most e
ff
cient
and e
ective means of obtaining and conveying irregular forms of informa-
tion, particularly when it is highly sensitive in nature. The early literature on
o
ff
cult it is
to substitute electronic contacts for personal ones. In the context of face-to-
face meetings, actors monitor one another's intentions and behavior through
observations of body language and include handshakes and eye contact,
which are essential to establishing relations of trust and mutual understand-
ing. Such interactions are simply not viable via telecommunications. As
a sizable body of literature concerned with New York and London has dem-
onstrated (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991; Budd and Whimster 1992; Longcore
and Rees 1996), the elites of global cities rely heavily on interpersonal con-
tacts saturated with trust and reciprocity to “get things done” (see Maskell
1999; Maskell and Malmberg 1999). Assets such as thick networks of inter-
personal ties, with all of the issues of trust and external economies of scale
that they embody, are very di
ce contact patterns (Kutay 1986), for example, revealed how di
cult to reproduce in other contexts, an obser-
vation that goes far to explain why the primacy of global cities such as
Amsterdam, London, and New York has changed little over the last 500
years. In fact, telecommunications are a notoriously poor substitute for face-
to-face meetings, the medium through which sensitive corporate interactions
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