Organizing ‘the firm’ in industrial geography I: networks, institutions and regional development

I want to begin the first of my three annual progress reports on industrial geography by claiming that industrial geography, at least as I know it, has done very well within the geographical and, perhaps even, the wider social-scientific discourses. I am pleased the subdiscipline has lived up to the concluding remark by Taylor (1986: 412) in his progress report some 14 years ago that industrial geography was ‘alive and well and encouragingly contentious’. In this and two other reports, I aim to sustain my optimism with an indulgence in the most recent studies which have contributed towards a more pluralistic industrial geography. Although I have taken ‘the firm’ as a fundamental category to define the arbitrary boundary of industrial geography, I am more than happy to situate ‘the firm’ within the context of wider social relations, politicaleconomic processes and environmental change (see also Barnes, 1996a; Hayter, 1997; Lee and Wills, 1997; Schoenberger, 1997; Barnes and Gertler, 1999; Sheppard and Barnes, 1999; Clark et al., 2000).1 In my view, the firm in industrial geography goes beyond being an economic entity; it is also a sociospatial construction embedded in broader discourses and practices (Yeung, 1998a; see also Oinas, 1997; Taylor, 1999). This reconfiguration of our conceptions of the firm in industrial geography therefore helps us to make sense of the diverse and plural range of industrial geographical studies in the past few years (see also Thrift and Olds, 1996; Schoenberger, 1998). My pluralistic view of the firm and industrial geography, however, poses a significant problem for writing my progress reports because there may be some overlap with the material and studies chosen for review by other recent progress reports on political economy (Barnes, 1995; 1996b; 1998) and geographies of money and finance (Leyshon, Progress in Human Geography 24,2 (2000) pp. 301–315