Stretching tacit knowledge beyond a local fix? Global spaces of learning in advertising professional service firms

The ‘knowledge economy’ is now widely debated and economic geographers have highlighted the ‘new regions’ ability to produce and disseminate tacit knowledge. However, there is concern that such work is responsible for the unfounded association of tacit knowledge with solely the local scale. Through examination of empirical material exploring the stretching of learning in advertising professional service firms, the paper argues that we need to differentiate: knowledge transfer in the form of best practice and ‘social learning’; and inter-firm versus intra-firm learning. This highlights the different ‘modes of learning’ at different scales but the existence of multiple geographies of tacit knowledge.