Putting knowledge in (its) place: knowledge exchange/transfer and clustering

In this paper we argue that existing mainstream conceptualizations of knowledge, knowledge transfer, and knowledge exchange (KT/E) have reached their limits. Those limits are embedded in a physical conception of knowledge as ‘thing’; we counter this with the notion of knowledge as ‘relation’. The paper is divided into four sections. The first sketches out the macroview, the great transformation of the knowledge economy and how it has been characterized. Second, we review micro accounts of KT/E in locational studies. The third part of the paper points to some fundamental questions concerning knowledge common to both approaches. We present the challenge of the relational knowledge conception, and suggest that this throws normative expectations of the knowledge economy (as an iteration of the physical economy) into difficulty. It is indicative that normative theory has struggled at its limits to capture these ‘effects’, floundering on overandunder socialization/economization and vague terms such as ‘buzz’ to indicate the problem. In the fourth part we explore the consequences of the relational concept of knowledge to the reexplanation of KT/E and clustering which we refer to as the learning ecosystem.