Meric S. Gertler

• University of Toronto

We examine recent evidence concerning the fate of creative workers since the economic crash of 2007–2008. There is some consensus that the creative economy is an important economic driver and does represent a source of fundamental economic change. There is less agreement on what this change means for the creative worker and workforce. Some studies...

Economic geography has undergone a renaissance, led by a new generation of scholars working on problems at the intersections of economics, geography, management studies and regional studies. The Journal has captured this moment in the development of the field, providing a publication venue for innovative research shorn of past dogmas but sensitive...

Spencer G. M., Vinodrai T., Gertler M. S. and Wolfe D. A. Do clusters make a difference? Defining and assessing their economic performance, Regional Studies. This paper contributes to the literature on cluster dynamics by developing a new methodology for identifying clusters that is not dependent on United States-based definitions. This methodology...

GERTLER M. S. Rules of the game: the place of institutions in regional economic change, Regional Studies. Institutions exert a pervasive influence on the evolution and character of regional economies. Yet, this role is poorly understood within recent debates on neoliberalism, varieties of capitalism, and other approaches to the study of economic ch...

Lowe N. J. and Gertler M. S. Building on diversity: institutional foundations of hybrid strategies in Toronto's life sciences complex, Regional Studies. Geographical studies of innovation typically examine the impact of regional institutions on new product and process development. This study considers the influence of these institutional systems on...

Despite the widespread interest of national, regional and local governments in promoting their own biotechnology industry, it is now well known that this sector exhibits characteristically high levels of geographical clustering in a relatively small number of locations. However, what is less well understood is how these regions have emerged and evo...

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [Bathelt, H., & Gertler, M. S. (2005). The German variety of capitalism: Forces and dynamics of evolutionary change. Economic Geography, 81(1), 1-9.], which has been published in final form at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2005.tb00252.x/abstract. This article may...

Canada is one of the most urban societies in the world. The nature and role of our cities has changed continually over time. The author documents the current and growing centrality of cities in contemporary society, demonstrates the interconnectedness of the economic and the social at the local level, and considers the nature of this relationship i...

The process of knowledge production exhibits a very distinctive geography. This article argues that this geography is fundamental, not incidental, to the innovation process itself: that one simply cannot understand innovation properly if one does not appreciate the central role of spatial proximity and concentration in this process. The goal of thi...

The geographical literature on communities of practice suggests that geographical proximity should not be confused with relational proximity, and that the latter is more important in determining how easily specialized knowledge can be jointly produced and shared through distributed innovation processes. However, the existing body of work has not sp...

Liberalization has proceeded to the point where the prospect of reversing the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) or the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) now seems unthinkable. Technological dependency has been a fact of life since the earliest days of settlement here. The cultural sovereignty of Canadians - so hard-won during the act...

Over the last quarter of a century the Canadian economy experienced a series of profound changes which have affected every level of society. They include new forms of flexible production, fundamental changes in regulation at all spatial scales, structural shifts away from manufacturing towards service sector activities, the rise of information tech...

This chapter considers the degree of path dependency in cluster origin and development. One issue that continues to bedevil the analysis of clusters is the question of their origins and the relative importance of chance events, or serendipity as opposed to planned policy actions. Much of the literature on path dependency, and a certain stream of an...

The literature on innovation and interactive learning has tended to emphasize the importance of local networks, inter-firm collaboration and knowledge flows as the principal source of technological dynamism. More recently, however, this view has come to be challenged by other perspectives that argue for the importance of non-local knowledge flows....

Local labor market policies of the federal government are critically evaluated with respect to their target efficiency and underlying theoretical assumptions. Policies of the Economic Development Administration are considered to be target inefficient compared to those of the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. Experimental mobility policies of t...

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to develop an understanding of the most significant determinants of spatio-temporal patterns of private capital accumulation in Canadian regions by focusing on both economic and political attributes of the regional investment context. Economic variables include spatial variations in profitability of production. labor costs...

At the very foundation of the cluster concept is the idea that proximity matters. This is manifest in a number of important ways. First, the geographical clustering of economic actors is said to facilitate the exchange of knowledge between them, through both traded and untraded means. The interaction that supports this is formal/planned as well as...

According to conventional wisdom, industrial practices in the advanced economies are becoming more alike as the forces of globalization strengthen and spread. Owing to the deep resources, increasing connectedness, and sophistication of large firms, corporate spaces of learning are now global in scope. Over time, these processes will spell the demis...

This paper surveys some of the current methodologies employed to analyse cluster development, as well as some of the key themes emerging from both the analytical and prescriptive literature noted above. It uses this survey as the context in which to present a synthesis of the initial findings of the current national study of industrial clusters in...

Recent years have seen a lively debate over the role of tacit knowledge and interactive learning in privileging the local over the global. Yet, our continuing inability to answer questions such as 'when and why is the local important in production and innovation processes?' indicates that our understanding of the firm and the forces that shape its...

A key question for policymakers at the regional and local level is how to provide the right conditions for generating the growth of more knowledge-intensive forms of economic activity within the context of dynamic innovation systems or learning regions. Regional foresight exercises may provide a useful instrument in helping chart their economic str...

Within economic geography and industrial economics, interest in the concept of tacit knowledge has grown steadily in recent years. Nelson and Winter helped revive this interest in the work of Michael Polanyi by using the idea of tacit knowledge to inform their analysis of routines and evolutionary dynamics of technological change. More recently, th...

One of the most significant consequences of the present process of globalization is the way in which it continues to turn inputs, previously crucial to the competitiveness of firms, into ubiquities. Globalization has increasingly been associated with the ‘unbundling’ of the previous relationship between sovereignty, territoriality and state power (...

In this paper we argue that far from being surpassed by globalization, the nation-state remains a key space for organized labour. However, labour geographers’ focus on patterns of union organization and strategies of ‘internationalism’ underplays the enduring role of national institutions. Moreover, while labour geographers have recognized the sign...

We live in an era of rapid economic and technological change marked by a high degree of uncertainty. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the shift from a steep recession at the beginning of the decade through two international financial crises to the recent phase of hyper growth, marked by higher levels of employment, significant gains in pr...

The last fifteen years of the twentieth century have seen the emergence of tremendous excitement, in both academic and policy realms, about the economic role of the region in advanced capitalist economies (Sabel, 1989; Cooke, 1999; Saxenian, 1994; Storper, 1995; Scott, 1996; Scott, 2000). Over this period, much has been written about the technologi...

Recent contributions suggest that the current period is characterized by a paradoxical consequence of globalization in which the ever greater integration of national and regional economies into the global one accentuates, rather than minimizes, the significance of the local context for innovative activities. This paper sketches out the implications...

According to many, we live in an age in which convergence between formerly distinct national ‘models’ is taking place. Central to this process is a learning dynamic in which best practices originating from within one model—Japan in the 1980s, United States in the 1990s—are supposedly adopted by firms elsewhere. This paper addresses two key question...

Two views have come to dominate the debate on the globalization of innovation in the emerging knowledge-based economy. The first contends that globalization reduces the significance of the home base as the primary site for innovation, as firms increasingly source and apply their innovations on a global basis. The second view as articulated in the i...

One of the most contentious and least‐resolved issues to emerge from contemporary debates about the global economy concerns the success with which new institutions for social regulation of the economy can be established, at either supra‐ or sub‐national scales, to supplant the role traditionally performed by the nation‐state. While much has been wr...

Over the past decade, the industrial economies have witnessed a wave of economic and political change that most find difficult to comprehend. The phrase that keeps reappearing in attempts to explain this phenomenon is ‘a shift in the tectonic plates’ that shape our society (Stewart 1997, xvii). At the root of this change are three interrelated proc...

Geographers and other social scientists have paid considerable attentio recently to what has been characterized as the increasingly social character of economic activity. Of particular interest has been the rise of more collaborative relations among firms and the formation of territorial production networks predicated upon joint product development...

German producers of advanced machinery have long enjoyed a reputation for technical excellence and export success. The literature attributes much of the industry's success, inter alia, to various forms of interfirm cooperation between SMEs within spatial clusters such as that found in Baden-Württemberg. However, this industry entered a period of re...

Recent work on innovation and technology implementation suggests the importance of closeness between collaborating parties for the successful development and adoption of new technologies. This idea is subjected to empirical scrutiny through a postal survey and set of interviews with users of advanced manufacturing technologies in southern Ontario....

GERTLER M. S. (1993) Implementing advanced manufacturing technologies in mature industrial regions: towards a social model of technology production, Reg. Studies 27, 665–680. Industrial surveys reveal that manufacturers in mature industrial regions of Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom have been adopting advanced process technologies...

A vibrant debate has raged in geography and other social sciences over the past several years, concerning the nature and extent of changes to contemporary capitalism that might be identified as more flexible. This paper critically surveys the recent work on this theme, identifying areas of consensus, continuing disagreement, and important but still...

A critical commentary on the articles by Barnes, Sheppard, and Pavlik that are part of this special issue on "Space and analytical political economy".

In this paper I reply to Schoenberger's response to my original paper on the limits to flexibility as a viable strategy for firms to employ in responding to economic change. After summarizing the areas of apparent agreement between Schoenberger and myself, I proceed to clarify some misunderstandings as well as to reassert some remaining differences...

Geographers have recently begun to pay more attention to the conceptualisation of time in both their theory and their empirical method. In the spirit of furthering this endeavour within the field of economic geography, I identify a number of key problems which I contend must be addressed to make an adequate treatment of time possible. These concern...

Recently some economic geographers have drawn our attention to what are alleged to be fundamental changes in production, based on the adoption of more flexible machines and labour within firms, and more flexible relations between firms. Certain spatial implications such as reagglomeration of production are said to have resulted from these changes,...

Historically, geographers have been keen to adopt bodies of theory from other disciplines in a somewhat uncritical manner. This practice has surfaced again in the recent attempts to apply notions from catastrophe theory to the study of regional development. This paper is an examination of one such application to the modeling of interregional capita...

Gertler M. S. (1986) Regional dynamics of manufacturing and non-manufacturing investment in Canada, Reg. Studies 20, 523--534. Much has been made of the recent structural changes in national and regional economies in which non-manufacturing activities have become increasingly important providers of employment. Yet, traditional models of local econo...

A model of regional production is proposed which links local output to the distribution of income between owners and workers. In contrast to conventional regional production theories, our model is adjustment oriented, eschewing equilibrium for disequilibrium and certainty for uncertainty. The model demonstrates the integration of short-run events w...

This paper addresses the issue of how regions grow and decline, focusing on actual productive capacity within a region (rather than population, income, or migration). Traditional theory has emphasized the role of industrial inertia and cumulative causation in imposing stability on the spatial distribution of capital stock over time, while recent th...

Using yearly estimates of U.S. interstate migration and state-level capital stocks we explore the relationships between migration and capital in a time-series framework for the period 1958-1975. The analysis shows that capital growth leads in-migration for fast-growing states, although no obvious relationship is apparent for some rapidly growing ar...

The essence of innovation is the process of bringing to market new products or processes which, if successful, generate new economic value. Traditionally, we have come to view this process as one in which the primary inputs are scientific, technological, or commercial. Scientists working in university, corporate or public labs generate new knowledg...

The goal of cluster development remains an elusive target for many local economic development agencies. The fascination with industrial clusters arises out of the perceived relation between clustering and enhanced competitiveness and innovation performance. A key challenge for policy-makers is how to generate cluster-based development. The cluster...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1983. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [339]-359). Microfiche.

University Microfilms order no. 83-22350. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1983. Includes bibliographical references.