- Email: [email protected]
Capitalising on knowledge
Geoforum 31 (2000) v±vii
www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Introduction
Capitalising on knowledge Nick Henry and Jane Pollard School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
Introduction This Special Issue develops from a series of sessions organised by the Economic Geography Research Group at the 1998 Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society ± Institute of British Geographers. The inspiration for those sessions was the publication of Manuel Castells' (1996, 1997, 1998) highly in¯uential trilogy, The Information Age : Economy, Society and Culture. Castells' statement on the knowledge±space± economy nexus engaged with an array of work that was starting to appear concerning the role of knowledge and learning in contemporary capitalist economies. Castells argued that while information and knowledge have always been important, capitalist societies are now entering an era in which the ability of labour, ®rms, regions and nations to produce, circulate and apply knowledge are fundamental to economic growth and competitiveness. `Informational capitalism' for Castells is not about the growth of a post-industrial information processing sector; all departments, sectors and sub-sectors of economies are, or are becoming, informational in the sense that information and knowledge are widely embodied in work processes and accessed through information technologies. Although Castells' vision has been subjected to critique (Bauman, 1998; Knox, 1999; Fuller, 1999; Mitchell, 1999; Watson, 1998), his emphasis on knowledge creation and economic growth resonates with a broader agenda emerging in geography and other social sciences (for example, see the contributions in Bryson et al. 2000). Hodgson (1999, pp. 181, 182), for example, cites ®ve developments which have enhanced the importance attached to knowledge production, use and circulation in economic life today: (1) processes of production and their products are becoming more complex and sophisticated; (2) increasingly advanced knowledge and skills are being required in many processes of production to
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Nick Henry) [email protected] (Jane Pollard)
cope with growing diculty and complexity; (3) there is an increasing reliance on specialist and idiosyncratic skills; (4) the use and transfer of information is becoming more extensive and important for economic activities and (5) there is increasing uncertainty in contemporary economic life. Nevertheless, despite a growing academic and popular consensus as to the importance of knowledge (Coyle, 1997; DTI, 1998; Leadbeater, 1999), research which indicates precisely how the production and translation of dierent forms of knowledge is signi®cant in contemporary capitalism is still in its infancy. As such, it is necessary to interrogate the conceptual, empirical and political underpinnings of a concept as slippery as `knowledge'. What is knowledge? What is it to know? How are dierent forms of knowledge created, mobilised, understood and stored for future use? What factors in¯uence the evolution of knowledges and their utilisation? Which aspects of economic knowledges are important in which contexts and why? How do various actors capitalise on such knowledges? These are just some of the questions which remain unanswered yet describe the contours of an emergent research agenda. The papers in this Special Issue represent some early geographical forays into this agenda as they seek to illustrate dierent aspects of knowledges and how they become economic.
Themes The papers in this Special Issue consider objects of study as diverse as organic foods (Kevin Morgan and Jonathan Murdoch), ¯owers and plants (Alex Hughes, and Roger Lee), resort development (Phillip O'Neill and Sarah Whatmore), racing cars (Nick Henry and Steven Pinch), and economic development strategies (Gordon MacLeod, and Arnoud Lagendijk and James Cornford). All the papers consider, in one way or another, the commodi®cation of dierent knowledges. As all manner of knowledges are being commodi®ed in contemporary capitalism (see, for example, Jessop, 2000; Bell, 2000), it
0016-7185/00/$ - see front matter Ó 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 7 1 8 5 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 2 - 6
vi
Introduction/Geoforum 31 (2000) v±vii
is clear that there are wide variations in the capacities of agents to participate in the processes of knowledge creation, circulation and management. Yet under informational capitalism such capacities are critical to the futures of cities, regions and their inhabitants. The production and transformation of knowledge thus becomes another element in the experience of uneven development (Hudson, 1999). The authors grapple with a number of themes concerning `economic' knowledges, their conceptualisation and the spatialities and politics of their production. Politically, one of the most visible manifestations of capitalising on knowledge, especially for policy audiences, has been the advent of `new regionalist thought' (Lovering, 1999). Lagendijk and Cornford trace the genesis and circulation of the concepts of `new regionalism' via a social constructivist-inspired case study of the regional development industry. Focusing on the concepts of `clusters' and `learning regions', they illustrate the key role played by a number of agents including, interestingly, academics as consultants. MacLeod's paper goes one step further in demonstrating the impact of such policy on the economic, social and political governance structures of Lowland Scotland. He concludes by arguing that policy rhetorics around knowledge and learning have served to obscure a broader erosion of the Keynesian welfarist settlement. While the above two papers consider the production and mobilisation of knowledges for explicitly political ends, the papers by Morgan and Murdoch, Hughes, and Henry and Pinch all examine the mobilisation of economic knowledges in order to understand some of the changing architectures of production and consumption within contemporary capitalism. Morgan and Murdoch draw on ideas of codi®ed and tacit knowledges to analyse changing forms of agricultural production. They adopt `a broad evolutionary approach' to examine the changing distribution of economic knowledge and power centred on organic food production. Relatedly, through a reworking of commodity chain analysis, Hughes traces the range of dierent knowledges that are re®guring the economic organisation of the global cut ¯ower trade. She outlines the development, application and increasing power of UK retailers' business knowledges in the context of their exchange relations with Kenyan ¯ower producers. In the analysis of an `innovative cluster', namely the UK's Motor Sport Valley, Henry and Pinch demonstrate empirically some of the mechanisms of knowledge generation and dissemination in an archetypal knowledge space. In so doing, they provide a tentative methodology for tracing some of the microfoundations of a particular economic region. The papers by Lee and O'Neill and Whatmore not only examine economic knowledges in action, but also challenge existing interpretations of what kinds of knowledges constitute `the economic'. O'Neill and
Whatmore, for example, use actor network theory, and a case study of the Hunter Valley in Australia, to illustrate how economic development stories (and by extension all stories of the economic) are partial; they are hybrids born of our choices of entry points into the analysis of any economic system. Rejecting one-dimensional economic narratives, they argue for greater conceptual and narrative ¯uidity through the unravelling of the multiple networks, sites and agencies that con®gure a gastronomic landscape in and of the Hunter Valley. Similarly, Lee prompts us to recognise that `the economic' encompasses a whole range of behaviours driven by the everyday activities of social beings. The economic is much broader than any one particular (capitalist) economic rationale (for example, making a pro®t) and, in a far reaching argument, Lee begins to explore some possibilities for decentreing, or at least disrupting, `the economic' in social reproduction. Knowledge, the economic and economic geography In an introduction such as this, it is common to re¯ect on the extended time between the presentation of papers at a conference and their ®nal publication to a (slightly) wider audience. As with all such publications, one is able to point to the development and re®nement of ideas and thoughts which has occurred in the interim. The product, we suggest, comprises seven high quality, mutually reinforcing, papers. Moreover, we would argue that this is an especially opportune time for the publication of this set of papers. This is so because many of the papers engage directly with, or are very much products of, a destabilisation of traditional narratives of the economic and their takenfor-granted analytical categories, such as production and consumption. For example, all the papers take as given the social, political and cultural construction of the `economic' (Thrift and Olds, 1996; Crang, 1997). Further, Lee argues for an alternative concept of the economic which involves not the displacement of the economic per se but rather an understanding of how the social purposes of activity (for example, gift-giving, making a pro®t or, indeed, buying a rare species of plant for your collection) drive our conceptualisations of the economy and what becomes economic. In questioning the construction of the economic, and how we access the materiality of economic activity, these papers thus resonate with ongoing debates about the status and nature of contemporary economic geography (see Markusen, 1999; Martin, 1999, 2000; Peck, 1999). Ann Markusen (1999), in particular, argues that economic geography since the mid-1980s has been characterised by a lack of conceptual clarity (`fuzzy concepts' which are dicult to operationalise), lack of empirical rigour (scanty or selective evidence) and a worrying
Introduction/Geoforum 31 (2000) v±vii
detachment from political and policy advocacy (lack of `relevance'). In combination with Ron Martin's commentaries (1999, 2000), this represents an emerging critique of many of the current ideas, concepts, ways of thinking and policy relevance of economic geography. The papers in this Special Issue, though written prior to the composition of these critiques, do, in a number of ways, address some of these concerns. The papers explore some of the new vocabulary of economic activity, for example, knowledge, learning regions, commodity chains, knowledge communities and so forth. In so doing, they employ a wide range of conceptualisations, methodologies and techniques designed to access the material bases of this vocabulary (for example, political economy, actor network theory, circuits and networks and `stylised accounts'). Such analyses generate a diversity of (at times innovative) forms of evidence for their assertions which, we would argue, could be used as the basis for a whole range of political interventions (Pollard et al., 2000). Of greater import, however, is the way in which these papers re¯ect a growing multi-perspectival nature (see Martin, 1994) to the practice of contemporary economic geography. To give an example, Markusen (1999, p. 870) suggests, A fuzzy concept is one which posits an entity, phenomenon or process which possesses two or more alternative meanings and thus cannot be reliably identi®ed or applied by dierent readers or scholars. An actor network theory-inspired approach would argue, by contrast, that the rede®nition of objects as they move within economic networks is not only inevitable, but also one of the aspects that requires investigation. By the same token, Markusen's (1999, p. 870) wish for certainty in answering the question, ``how do I know it when I see it? '' is problematic if we accept the contextual construction of the economic. For many, as evidenced in this Theme Issue, fuzzy concepts, or the deliberate problematization of objects, is both analytically and politically useful (even if it produces its own set of thorny issues around replicability and generalisability). In other words, contemporary economic geography is now marked by a plurality of epistemologies, theories, methodologies and, ultimately, economic geographies. To conclude, if knowledge and learning have gatecrashed the vocabulary of economic geography many would argue that they have done so in response to the changing nature of capitalist organisation. In turn, many who employ this vocabulary would argue also that we need to rethink how we theorise, represent and explain economic activity. To our minds, these papers provide a provocative and exciting introduction to the debates around knowledge±space±economy whilst exemplifying also the evolving nature of economic geography.
vii
References Bauman, Z., 1998. The information age: economy, society and culture volume 1: the rise of the network society. Political Studies 46 (4), 803±804. Bell, M., 2000. Visions of space, place, time and life- useful knowledge, the human form and the new genetics. In: Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., Henry, N.D., Pollard, J.S. (Eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy. Routledge, London. Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., Henry, N.D., Pollard, J.S. (Eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy. Routledge, London. Castells, M., 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells, M., 1997. The Power of Identity. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells, M., 1998. End of Millennium. Blackwell, Oxford. Coyle, D., 1997. The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy. Capstone, Oxford. Crang, P., 1997. Cultural turns and the (re)constitution of economic geography. In: Lee, R., Wills, J. (Eds.), Geographies of Economies. Arnold, London, pp. 3±15. Department of Trade and Industry, 1998. Our competitive future: building the knowledge driven economy. London Fuller, S., 1999. The information age: economy society and culture, vol. 1; the rise of the network society, vol. 2; the power of identity, vol. 3, end of millennium. Science Technology & Human Values 24 (1), 159±166 Hodgson, G., 1999. Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is not the End of History. Routledge, London. Hudson, R., 1999. `The learning economy, the learning ®rm and the learning region': a sympathetic critique of the limits to learning. European Urban and Regional Studies 6 (1), 59±72. Jessop, R., 2000. The state and contradictions of the knowledge-driven economy. In: Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., Henry, N.D., Pollard, J.S. (Eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy. Routledge, London. Knox, P., 1999. The information age: economy society and culture, vol. 1; the rise of the network society, vol. 2; the power of identity, vol. 3, end of millennium. Urban Geography 20 (3), 287±289. Leadbeater, C., 1999. Living on Thin Air: The New Economy. Viking, London. Lovering, J., 1999. Theory led by policy? The inadequacies of the new regionalism in economic geography illustrated from the case of Wales. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23 (2), 379±395. Markusen, A., 1999. Fuzzy concepts, scanty evidence, policy distance: the case for rigour and policy relevance in critical regional studies. Regional Studies 33 (9), 869±884. Martin, R., 1994. Economic theory and human geography. In: Gregory, D., Martin, R., Smith, G.E. (Eds.), Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science. Macmillan, London, pp. 21±53. Martin, R., 1999. The `new economic geography': challenge or irrelevance? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (4), 387±391. Martin, R., 2000. Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda. Progress in Human Geography Mitchell, K., 1999. The rise of the network society. Antipode 31 (2), pp. 235±239. Peck, J.A., 1999. Grey geography? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (2), 131±135. Pollard, J.S., Henry, N.D., Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., 2000. Shades of grey? Geographers and policy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25 (1) Thrift, N.J., Olds, K., 1996. Re®guring the economic in economic geography. Progress in Human Geography 20, 311±337. Watson, S., 1998. New orders, disorders and creative chaos: the information age and the network society. Policy and Politics 26 (2), 227±233.
www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Introduction
Capitalising on knowledge Nick Henry and Jane Pollard School of Geography and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
Introduction This Special Issue develops from a series of sessions organised by the Economic Geography Research Group at the 1998 Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society ± Institute of British Geographers. The inspiration for those sessions was the publication of Manuel Castells' (1996, 1997, 1998) highly in¯uential trilogy, The Information Age : Economy, Society and Culture. Castells' statement on the knowledge±space± economy nexus engaged with an array of work that was starting to appear concerning the role of knowledge and learning in contemporary capitalist economies. Castells argued that while information and knowledge have always been important, capitalist societies are now entering an era in which the ability of labour, ®rms, regions and nations to produce, circulate and apply knowledge are fundamental to economic growth and competitiveness. `Informational capitalism' for Castells is not about the growth of a post-industrial information processing sector; all departments, sectors and sub-sectors of economies are, or are becoming, informational in the sense that information and knowledge are widely embodied in work processes and accessed through information technologies. Although Castells' vision has been subjected to critique (Bauman, 1998; Knox, 1999; Fuller, 1999; Mitchell, 1999; Watson, 1998), his emphasis on knowledge creation and economic growth resonates with a broader agenda emerging in geography and other social sciences (for example, see the contributions in Bryson et al. 2000). Hodgson (1999, pp. 181, 182), for example, cites ®ve developments which have enhanced the importance attached to knowledge production, use and circulation in economic life today: (1) processes of production and their products are becoming more complex and sophisticated; (2) increasingly advanced knowledge and skills are being required in many processes of production to
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Nick Henry) [email protected] (Jane Pollard)
cope with growing diculty and complexity; (3) there is an increasing reliance on specialist and idiosyncratic skills; (4) the use and transfer of information is becoming more extensive and important for economic activities and (5) there is increasing uncertainty in contemporary economic life. Nevertheless, despite a growing academic and popular consensus as to the importance of knowledge (Coyle, 1997; DTI, 1998; Leadbeater, 1999), research which indicates precisely how the production and translation of dierent forms of knowledge is signi®cant in contemporary capitalism is still in its infancy. As such, it is necessary to interrogate the conceptual, empirical and political underpinnings of a concept as slippery as `knowledge'. What is knowledge? What is it to know? How are dierent forms of knowledge created, mobilised, understood and stored for future use? What factors in¯uence the evolution of knowledges and their utilisation? Which aspects of economic knowledges are important in which contexts and why? How do various actors capitalise on such knowledges? These are just some of the questions which remain unanswered yet describe the contours of an emergent research agenda. The papers in this Special Issue represent some early geographical forays into this agenda as they seek to illustrate dierent aspects of knowledges and how they become economic.
Themes The papers in this Special Issue consider objects of study as diverse as organic foods (Kevin Morgan and Jonathan Murdoch), ¯owers and plants (Alex Hughes, and Roger Lee), resort development (Phillip O'Neill and Sarah Whatmore), racing cars (Nick Henry and Steven Pinch), and economic development strategies (Gordon MacLeod, and Arnoud Lagendijk and James Cornford). All the papers consider, in one way or another, the commodi®cation of dierent knowledges. As all manner of knowledges are being commodi®ed in contemporary capitalism (see, for example, Jessop, 2000; Bell, 2000), it
0016-7185/00/$ - see front matter Ó 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 7 1 8 5 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 0 2 - 6
vi
Introduction/Geoforum 31 (2000) v±vii
is clear that there are wide variations in the capacities of agents to participate in the processes of knowledge creation, circulation and management. Yet under informational capitalism such capacities are critical to the futures of cities, regions and their inhabitants. The production and transformation of knowledge thus becomes another element in the experience of uneven development (Hudson, 1999). The authors grapple with a number of themes concerning `economic' knowledges, their conceptualisation and the spatialities and politics of their production. Politically, one of the most visible manifestations of capitalising on knowledge, especially for policy audiences, has been the advent of `new regionalist thought' (Lovering, 1999). Lagendijk and Cornford trace the genesis and circulation of the concepts of `new regionalism' via a social constructivist-inspired case study of the regional development industry. Focusing on the concepts of `clusters' and `learning regions', they illustrate the key role played by a number of agents including, interestingly, academics as consultants. MacLeod's paper goes one step further in demonstrating the impact of such policy on the economic, social and political governance structures of Lowland Scotland. He concludes by arguing that policy rhetorics around knowledge and learning have served to obscure a broader erosion of the Keynesian welfarist settlement. While the above two papers consider the production and mobilisation of knowledges for explicitly political ends, the papers by Morgan and Murdoch, Hughes, and Henry and Pinch all examine the mobilisation of economic knowledges in order to understand some of the changing architectures of production and consumption within contemporary capitalism. Morgan and Murdoch draw on ideas of codi®ed and tacit knowledges to analyse changing forms of agricultural production. They adopt `a broad evolutionary approach' to examine the changing distribution of economic knowledge and power centred on organic food production. Relatedly, through a reworking of commodity chain analysis, Hughes traces the range of dierent knowledges that are re®guring the economic organisation of the global cut ¯ower trade. She outlines the development, application and increasing power of UK retailers' business knowledges in the context of their exchange relations with Kenyan ¯ower producers. In the analysis of an `innovative cluster', namely the UK's Motor Sport Valley, Henry and Pinch demonstrate empirically some of the mechanisms of knowledge generation and dissemination in an archetypal knowledge space. In so doing, they provide a tentative methodology for tracing some of the microfoundations of a particular economic region. The papers by Lee and O'Neill and Whatmore not only examine economic knowledges in action, but also challenge existing interpretations of what kinds of knowledges constitute `the economic'. O'Neill and
Whatmore, for example, use actor network theory, and a case study of the Hunter Valley in Australia, to illustrate how economic development stories (and by extension all stories of the economic) are partial; they are hybrids born of our choices of entry points into the analysis of any economic system. Rejecting one-dimensional economic narratives, they argue for greater conceptual and narrative ¯uidity through the unravelling of the multiple networks, sites and agencies that con®gure a gastronomic landscape in and of the Hunter Valley. Similarly, Lee prompts us to recognise that `the economic' encompasses a whole range of behaviours driven by the everyday activities of social beings. The economic is much broader than any one particular (capitalist) economic rationale (for example, making a pro®t) and, in a far reaching argument, Lee begins to explore some possibilities for decentreing, or at least disrupting, `the economic' in social reproduction. Knowledge, the economic and economic geography In an introduction such as this, it is common to re¯ect on the extended time between the presentation of papers at a conference and their ®nal publication to a (slightly) wider audience. As with all such publications, one is able to point to the development and re®nement of ideas and thoughts which has occurred in the interim. The product, we suggest, comprises seven high quality, mutually reinforcing, papers. Moreover, we would argue that this is an especially opportune time for the publication of this set of papers. This is so because many of the papers engage directly with, or are very much products of, a destabilisation of traditional narratives of the economic and their takenfor-granted analytical categories, such as production and consumption. For example, all the papers take as given the social, political and cultural construction of the `economic' (Thrift and Olds, 1996; Crang, 1997). Further, Lee argues for an alternative concept of the economic which involves not the displacement of the economic per se but rather an understanding of how the social purposes of activity (for example, gift-giving, making a pro®t or, indeed, buying a rare species of plant for your collection) drive our conceptualisations of the economy and what becomes economic. In questioning the construction of the economic, and how we access the materiality of economic activity, these papers thus resonate with ongoing debates about the status and nature of contemporary economic geography (see Markusen, 1999; Martin, 1999, 2000; Peck, 1999). Ann Markusen (1999), in particular, argues that economic geography since the mid-1980s has been characterised by a lack of conceptual clarity (`fuzzy concepts' which are dicult to operationalise), lack of empirical rigour (scanty or selective evidence) and a worrying
Introduction/Geoforum 31 (2000) v±vii
detachment from political and policy advocacy (lack of `relevance'). In combination with Ron Martin's commentaries (1999, 2000), this represents an emerging critique of many of the current ideas, concepts, ways of thinking and policy relevance of economic geography. The papers in this Special Issue, though written prior to the composition of these critiques, do, in a number of ways, address some of these concerns. The papers explore some of the new vocabulary of economic activity, for example, knowledge, learning regions, commodity chains, knowledge communities and so forth. In so doing, they employ a wide range of conceptualisations, methodologies and techniques designed to access the material bases of this vocabulary (for example, political economy, actor network theory, circuits and networks and `stylised accounts'). Such analyses generate a diversity of (at times innovative) forms of evidence for their assertions which, we would argue, could be used as the basis for a whole range of political interventions (Pollard et al., 2000). Of greater import, however, is the way in which these papers re¯ect a growing multi-perspectival nature (see Martin, 1994) to the practice of contemporary economic geography. To give an example, Markusen (1999, p. 870) suggests, A fuzzy concept is one which posits an entity, phenomenon or process which possesses two or more alternative meanings and thus cannot be reliably identi®ed or applied by dierent readers or scholars. An actor network theory-inspired approach would argue, by contrast, that the rede®nition of objects as they move within economic networks is not only inevitable, but also one of the aspects that requires investigation. By the same token, Markusen's (1999, p. 870) wish for certainty in answering the question, ``how do I know it when I see it? '' is problematic if we accept the contextual construction of the economic. For many, as evidenced in this Theme Issue, fuzzy concepts, or the deliberate problematization of objects, is both analytically and politically useful (even if it produces its own set of thorny issues around replicability and generalisability). In other words, contemporary economic geography is now marked by a plurality of epistemologies, theories, methodologies and, ultimately, economic geographies. To conclude, if knowledge and learning have gatecrashed the vocabulary of economic geography many would argue that they have done so in response to the changing nature of capitalist organisation. In turn, many who employ this vocabulary would argue also that we need to rethink how we theorise, represent and explain economic activity. To our minds, these papers provide a provocative and exciting introduction to the debates around knowledge±space±economy whilst exemplifying also the evolving nature of economic geography.
vii
References Bauman, Z., 1998. The information age: economy, society and culture volume 1: the rise of the network society. Political Studies 46 (4), 803±804. Bell, M., 2000. Visions of space, place, time and life- useful knowledge, the human form and the new genetics. In: Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., Henry, N.D., Pollard, J.S. (Eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy. Routledge, London. Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., Henry, N.D., Pollard, J.S. (Eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy. Routledge, London. Castells, M., 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells, M., 1997. The Power of Identity. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells, M., 1998. End of Millennium. Blackwell, Oxford. Coyle, D., 1997. The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy. Capstone, Oxford. Crang, P., 1997. Cultural turns and the (re)constitution of economic geography. In: Lee, R., Wills, J. (Eds.), Geographies of Economies. Arnold, London, pp. 3±15. Department of Trade and Industry, 1998. Our competitive future: building the knowledge driven economy. London Fuller, S., 1999. The information age: economy society and culture, vol. 1; the rise of the network society, vol. 2; the power of identity, vol. 3, end of millennium. Science Technology & Human Values 24 (1), 159±166 Hodgson, G., 1999. Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is not the End of History. Routledge, London. Hudson, R., 1999. `The learning economy, the learning ®rm and the learning region': a sympathetic critique of the limits to learning. European Urban and Regional Studies 6 (1), 59±72. Jessop, R., 2000. The state and contradictions of the knowledge-driven economy. In: Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., Henry, N.D., Pollard, J.S. (Eds.), Knowledge, Space, Economy. Routledge, London. Knox, P., 1999. The information age: economy society and culture, vol. 1; the rise of the network society, vol. 2; the power of identity, vol. 3, end of millennium. Urban Geography 20 (3), 287±289. Leadbeater, C., 1999. Living on Thin Air: The New Economy. Viking, London. Lovering, J., 1999. Theory led by policy? The inadequacies of the new regionalism in economic geography illustrated from the case of Wales. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23 (2), 379±395. Markusen, A., 1999. Fuzzy concepts, scanty evidence, policy distance: the case for rigour and policy relevance in critical regional studies. Regional Studies 33 (9), 869±884. Martin, R., 1994. Economic theory and human geography. In: Gregory, D., Martin, R., Smith, G.E. (Eds.), Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science. Macmillan, London, pp. 21±53. Martin, R., 1999. The `new economic geography': challenge or irrelevance? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (4), 387±391. Martin, R., 2000. Geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda. Progress in Human Geography Mitchell, K., 1999. The rise of the network society. Antipode 31 (2), pp. 235±239. Peck, J.A., 1999. Grey geography? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (2), 131±135. Pollard, J.S., Henry, N.D., Bryson, J.R., Daniels, P.W., 2000. Shades of grey? Geographers and policy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25 (1) Thrift, N.J., Olds, K., 1996. Re®guring the economic in economic geography. Progress in Human Geography 20, 311±337. Watson, S., 1998. New orders, disorders and creative chaos: the information age and the network society. Policy and Politics 26 (2), 227±233.