Patrik Ström

University of Gothenburg | GU

As the world economy has become more dependent on services, the potential role of services for the facilitation of the transition towards the green economy has become vital. As intermediaries between different sectors, producer services are important parts of value chains and production networks. Producer services can drive the green transition in...

Purpose The circular economy (CE) has been endorsed as representing a model that is able to achieve environmental protection through decreased use of raw materials, together with changing economic values and social inclusion thanks to its demand for a wide variety of skill profiles. This has motivated many policy initiatives to support the implemen...

Despite the growing rates of Internet penetration and inflows of returnee entrepreneurs (REs) from Silicon Valley, there are still few examples of successful digital entrepreneurship ventures from emerging markets reaching international markets. Positioning itself at the intersection of returnee entrepreneurship, digital entrepreneurship and intern...

Service markets are both global and local. Firms develop strengths in the domestic market that can be exploited abroad, but we also see firms that from the very start work with international business models. The markets for these service firms are very different and the underlying competitive advantages that can be exploited can change rapidly. Thr...

Purpose Using the lens of Uber’s digital workers in Paris, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how the trust-building mechanism is constructed between a digital platform and its digital workers in a foreign market entry. Design/methodology/approach This is a case study based on empirical data from in-depth interviews with 35 Uber drivers...

There is currently only limited empirical research and theoretical conceptualisation of the role of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in the economies of Asia within economic geography or elsewhere in the wider social scientific literature. This paper argues that existing theoretical understandings of KIBS are inadequate to conceptualise...

The growth of digital creative industries has received increasing interest in economic geography, but our knowledge of factors shaping the longer-term growth and decline of digital creative industry clusters remains limited. We address this issue through a longitudinal case study of the Japanese video game software industry during the last three de...

The aim of this paper is to investigate how new rules and practices in multilateral, regional and bilateral trade negotiations related to the services industries can be adopted and implemented at the business level, using the recently concluded free-trade agreement (FTA) negotiations between the EU and Singapore as an illustrative case. The purpose...

This chapter discusses Online Service Providers (OSPs) and gauges whether they can be defined as a new and unique species of the firm. It is concluded that OSPs have many typical features such as their intermediary role, the dependence on network effects, and a capacity to grow rapidly across borders via the online medium, but that there are few fe...

The paper studies the growth of services in Latin America and their connection and integration with regional and global value chains. It relates to negotiations of free trade agreements and partnerships between with EU. The growth of services has also generated new possibilities for firms to expand within the region and onto the international marke...

The last decade has seen a rapid growth of Internet access across Africa, although it has not been evenly distributed. It is therefore important for policymakers to ask how policy can bridge this inequality of Internet access. This article addresses the dearth of research assessing the interplay between policy and Internet penetration by identifyin...

The aim of this chapter is to explore the concept of emerging markets through the close-up lens of the economic geographer. It is argued that we need to apply a more explicit and specific, yet flexible, idea of ‘space’ with all its inbuilt complexities and incongruities, in order to bridge the still prevailing mental gap between academic disciplina...

The chapter discusses the interaction between internationalization and innovation. These are processes that can enforce each other over time. Received theory on internationalization does not explain how firms within new sectors, such as internet service providers, make use of their internationalization process as a way to compete on innovation. Add...

In drawing this book to a conclusion, we do not intend to claim that all of the preceding contributions share the same theoretical perspective, definition of service industry activity or are approaching their various topics regarding greening the economy with equivalent research questions. It should also be obvious to the reader in reaching the end...

The debate about the emergence of an environmentally sustainable global economy has become more substantial and diverse in the last decade, and at times arguably more controversial. Early concepts of the ‘green economy’ in the 1990s (e.g., Jacobs 1996) have been superseded by a variety of different concepts of how economic activity might become env...

The spatial complexities of green economy are sparse in the literature but there is growing interest in research on Environmental Economic Geography as an emerging field (Bridge 2008; Soyez and Schulz 2008), the local aspects of developing green technology (Weiss 2008), and the eco-network (Störmer 2008) as well as theoretical/empirical contributio...

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate whether Sub-Saharan African countries are catching up with the rest of the world in terms of online usage. Online service usage is an important component of the discourse of the “digital divide”, an emblematic term for the inequality of information and communication technology access. Design/methodology/app...

Services and the Green Economy addresses a significant gap in the knowledge and understanding of sustainable economic development. Bringing together a range of expert contributions the book analyses the role of services and service industries in the transition to a greener economy. Framed by an approach within environmental economic geography, chap...

Samsung Electronics, headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, is the flagship company of the largest and oldest of the Korean chaebol, the Samsung Group. It is one of the world’s leading conglomerates, with revenues in 2012 of US$ 248 billion and 369,000 employees (Samsung Electronics, 2012a). Samsung Electronics alone is ranked 20th in the Fortune Gl...

It has long been conventional wisdom that the re-entrance of Asia has been one of the most remarkable events in the international economy during the last half century. Asia today contains almost 28 per cent of the global GDP in nominal values and 33 per cent when measured in purchasing-power parity terms.1 It is less commonly discussed, though, tha...

In this volume we have attempted to give a broad overview of the current scholarly debate around foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging Asian countries, in which the main message has been to demonstrate that FDI flows — inward and outward — continuously take new directions, and change form incessantly. Despite several decades of multifaceted a...

Japan has been a leading industrial power during the last 50 years. The manufacturing industry has developed world leading competitiveness and productivity. The service industry on the other hand has been less competitive and internationalized in comparison with other OECD countries. Increased regional and global competition changes the role of Jap...

This paper provides a critical analysis of European service research. The paper reviews the state of service research in 1991 and critically evaluates the subsequent two decades of academic research. The paper then identifies key research challenges that must be addressed over the next decade. The key issues identified include: the development of n...

Companies from Korea have become leading actors in the rapidly growing global online game market, being a knowledge and creativity intensive industry. The development of the industry raises a number of questions of the internationalisation process of companies in the intersection of creative- and technology-intensive industries. Co-evolution with u...

How managers reason, judge, and decide where to internationalize their businesses — for example, what new market to enter or where to (re)locate production — has been a central question in the literature on internationalization of firms since the early 1970s. As argued in the research review below, the disciplines of international business and econ...

In the globalized economy, companies compete on their value-added service offer. Japanese firms have a long tradition of outstanding manufacturing quality. However, the Japanese service industry is less developed in comparison with other OECD countries. Services have often been bundled together with products or internalized in manufacturing firms w...

This paper argues the case for combining international business theory and economic geography theory in order to understand the new rules of competition for both multinational corporations (MNCs) and regions in the globalising knowledge-based economy. Sweden serves as a case study to illustrate the shifts of sectors and people skills that have pave...

This article makes a contribution to the debate on regional economic development based on the increasing importance of the knowledge-driven or creative economy. The empirical data stems from research conducted on the structure of the creative economy in Sweden, where the results point to a few areas of importance for the concentration of the creati...

The paper presents an analysis of the economic relationship between the two most important economies in Asia. Over the last decades, the Chinese and Japanese economies have become more economically interdependent, a development which will, in the long run, impact the countries' political relationship. The paper seeks to answer the question: How can...

This paper explores the internationalization and location pattern of Japanese financial service firms in East and Southeast Asia. During a period of prolonged economic problems in the Japanese domestic market and a turbulent period in Asia because of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the situation for these service providers has changed drastical...

The policies and regulations of governments affect the online game industry in a variety of ways, especially in countries with extensive state involvement and a low degree of transparency in the economy. This article examines the influence of governmental policies on the development and operation of online games in China. The stance of the Chinese...

The paper explores the MMOG industry from a network perspective. The aim is to make a theoretical contribution of how this rapidly growing sector can be conceptualized by using a relational and spatial framework from economic geography and international business. Additionally, the paper uses the case of China to show how the theoretical model can b...

This paper explores the internationalisation of Japanese professional business service (PBS) firms. The UK was chosen as the geographical area of study due to the large number of Japanese foreign direct investments over the last 20 years. A comparative study of Japanese and Western service providers was conducted in the UK in spring 2002 to ascerta...

This survey essay examines the development and internationalization of the Japanese service sector. For this purpose, statistical data is analyzed together with a literature review. The Japanese service sector is smaller in contributions to gross domestic product (GDP) and employment share than the service sectors in other advanced economies. Limit...

This paper explores certain characteristics of Japanese professional business services (PBS). The aim is to develop an analytical typology consisting of the three dimensions – organizational linkage, service market, and competitive situation – for analysing the obtained empirical data. This typology has been developed in order to increase the under...

When this is written, the world holds its breath, waiting for the US to decide on a plan to save the countrys (and the worlds in prolongation) financial market. What and who will dictate growth and prosperity internationally in the future are at stake. This is also a moment for developing deeper understanding of underlying spatial prerequisites for...