https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

The Rise of the Creative Class

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Knowledge is recognized as an important weapon for sustaining competitive advantage and many companies are beginning to manage organizational knowledge Researchers have investigated knowledge management factors such as enablers, processes, and performance However, most current empirical research has explored the relationships between these factors in isolation To fill this gap, this paper develops a research model that interconnects knowledge management factors The model includes seven enablers: collaboration, trust, learning, centralization, formalization, T-shaped skills, and information technology support The emphasis is on knowledge creation processes such as socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization To establish credibility between knowledge creation and performance, organizational creativity is incorporated into the model Surveys collected from 58 firms were analyzed to test the model The results confirmed the impact of trust on knowledge creation The information technology support had a positive impact on knowledge combination only Organizational creativity was found to be critical for improving performance; neglecting ideas can undermine a business The results may be used as a stepping stone for further empirical research and can help formulate robust strategies that involve trade-offs between knowledge management enablers

Knowledge Management Enablers, Processes, and Organizational Performance: An Integrative View and Empirical Examination

The Limits to Capital

This article argues that financialization—shorthand for the growing influence of capital markets, their intermediaries, and processes in contemporary economic and political life—generates an analytical opportunity and political economic imperative to move finance into the heart of economic geographic analysis. Drawing upon long-standing concerns about the relatively marginal location of finance in economic geography, we emphasize the integral role of finance in connecting the entangled geographies of the economic to the social, the cultural, and the political. In the wake of various “turns” in the discipline, we develop this integrationist approach to finance in ways that retain political economies of states, markets, and social power in our interpretations of geographically uneven development. In this article, we discuss the plural nature of emergent work on financialization and develop three analytical themes to shape our discussion of financialization. Next, we elaborate our analytical approach...

Economic Geographies of Financialization

Who could have thought that banks would become nationalised, that state debts would reach historical levels, that bulge bracket investment banks would go bankrupt and that the masters of the universe would be so widely vilified? Each in their own way, the four reflections collected in this article address the new issues raised by the financial meltdown for the past and future of financial geography. They also reflect back on the issues raised in the introduction to the special issue and the way the papers making up the special issue provide ammunition for future research. The comments offer a remarkably coherent message that reflects that conveyed in the introduction about the potential, and especially the need to realise the potential, of financial geography at the current time.

/pdf/the-remit-of-financial-geography-before-and-after-the-crisis-593p0m8bt7.pdf

The remit of financial geography—before and after the crisis

A significant trend in global finance over the last 15 years has been the rapid growth of Islamic banking and finance (IBF), which has gathered momentum to become a significant feature of the financial landscape in the twenty-first century. This paper explores the increasingly ‘Western’ character of IBF and has two key aims. First, we address the remarkably under-theorized status of IBF by considering how various economic geographical and social theories might conceptualize its development. Second, and emerging from our reservations with these literatures, we argue that IBF exposes some of the limits of Western-centred readings of economic geographies and we chart a path towards a postcolonial political-economic geography. Postcolonial critiques are useful in two senses. First they provide a different set of lenses for understanding IBF as a self-consciously ‘other’ set of economic and social practices and second, they push us to reconsider or ‘provincialize’ our understandings of normative, hegemonic economic practices and knowledges, including ‘conventional’ banking and finance. In essence, the growth of IBF is a stimulus for economic geographers to consider how, for what purposes and from where they theorize – a task that is long overdue.

/pdf/islamic-banking-and-finance-postcolonial-political-economy-5cwpk21wm9.pdf

Islamic banking and finance: postcolonial political economy and the decentring of economic geography

This paper argues that firm finance is something of a 'black-box' in economic geography, a largely take-for-granted aspect of production. Focusing on small firms, the paper argues that firm finance warrants analysis, not simply to 'add' to knowledge and to form another sub-discipline of economic geography, but in order to further develop and refine our understanding of uneven development. The paper explores the neglect of firm finance in economic geography and highlights some of the contributions of literatures in economics and business. Finally, the paper outlines three points of intersection between these disparate, usually disciplinary-bound, literatures in business, economics and economic geography: the place - bound nature of firms, the social character of economic relations and third, the power relations and asymmetries inherent in financial relationships. These intersections are used to critique existing small firm finance literatures and to outline the contours of an emerging research agenda in economic geography.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1333718_code1197965.pdf?abstractid=1333718&mirid=1

Small Firm Finance and Economic Geography

It is no longer controversial to assert that the ‘mainstream’ of economic-geographical theorising, including that which defines itself as ‘international’, emerges from the experiences of Anglo-American regions and is articulated largely in the pages of ‘major international journals’, published overwhelmingly in English in the UK and USA. However, what is remarkable is that so much economic geography continues to presume that ‘the economy’ can and should be theorised solely from the perspective of the formal spaces of western economies. This brief intervention seeks to build on work which identifies and measures the Anglo-centrism of economic geography and explores the limits of such economic-geographical research in an attempt to foster what we regard as a long-overdue dialogue between economic geographers and scholars working with postcolonial approaches, broadly defined.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1492537_code1197965.pdf?abstractid=1492537&mirid=5

Jane Pollard

Papers

Economic Geographies of Financialization

The remit of financial geography—before and after the crisis

Islamic banking and finance: postcolonial political economy and the decentring of economic geography

Small Firm Finance and Economic Geography

Economic Geography under Postcolonial Scrutiny