Reconceptualising the "Firm" in New Economic Geographies: An Organisational Perspective

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Tim Bunnel, Neil Coe, and Kris Olds for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies. Abstract The "firm" has been a contested analytical category in economic geography. Much of neoclassical economic geography takes the firm as a self-contained and homogenous "black box" capable of producing economic outcomes in space. The radical literature subsumes the firm under dominant capitalist class relations such that capital's logic explains the spatial behaviour of the firm. These different perspectives on the firm have served the purposes of economic geography well. The recent emergence of "new economic geographies", however, has challenged those pre-existing conceptions of the firm. Influenced by a more fluid and hybrid interpretation of the "economic", new economic geographers have drawn insights from network theories and post-structural management theory to develop alternative theories of the firm. This paper aims to deconstruct hegemonic discourses of the firm in traditional economic geography, and offers an organisational perspective to reconceptualise the firm in the study of new economic geographies. It argues that the firm is a constellation of network relations governed by social actors. Instead of being an abstract capitalist imperative, the firm is a contested site for material and discursive constructions at different organisational and spatial scales. Mapping the power geometries of the firm entails significant analytical attention to the relational power of social actors and their territorial organisation. The paper also provides some implications for studying new economic geographies.