In the footprints of evolutionary economic geography

This special issue of Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography draws on evolutionary economic geography and ongoing discourses on the dynamism of industrial development. The aim of evolutionary economic geography is to examine how the economic landscape evolves over time (Martin & Sunley 2006; Sydow et al. 2009; Boschma & Martin 2010). One starting point for this line of research is to acknowledge that economic development is influenced and guided by responses to previous contingencies and choices made within systemic configurations. We investigate irreversible processes whereby the conditions of the past cannot be recovered. This requires historical considerations to be at the forefront of our analyses. Furthermore, this perspective focuses on the importance of novelty or change. Emphasizing the past does not entail historical determinism. Instead, analyses in evolutionary economic geography have emphasized the twin processes of continuation and change (Aarset & Jakobsen 2015). The development of an industry or a region is an open-ended process and the related literature investigates mechanisms for change or renewal of the economy. It focuses on issues such as the role of agency in the creation of new paths, changes in systemic configurations and institutions caused by the introduction of new procedures and rules, and the importance of coevolution between subsystems in the renewal of the economy. Evolutionary economic geography has certainly moved beyond a strict division between reproduction and renewal, and stresses that these twin dimensions coexist in all systems.

Martin & Sunley (2014, 714) argue that the aim of evolutionary economic geography is to ‘explore what evolutionary principles can be identified that help to explain change and transformation in the economic landscape’. Thus, their ambition is more modest than to construct an ‘all-embracing meta-theory’. This line of research is relatively new and still evolving, and there are certainly important dimensions that remain insufficiently understood. The articles in this special issue are intended to contribute to the ongoing development of this research stream, and taken together they shed light on two particularly important issues: scale and diversity.

Regarding scale, it can be argued that writing about evolutionary economic geography builds on two main approaches. The first is ‘generalized Darwinism’, which emphasizes the micro-scale and the firm. It began with Nelson & Winter’s (1982) work on business routines and the behaviour of firms. More recent studies have analysed how business populations evolve as well as the importance of selection mechanisms (Essletzbichler & Rigby 2010). The other main approach in evolutionary economic geography is ‘path dependence theory’, which focuses on the meso level and how systems such as industries, clusters, and innovation systems evolve (Martin & Sunley 2010).

For this special issue, we have selected contributions that emphasize different geographical levels to illustrate the importance of scale when analysing economic landscapes. Roughly categorized, the levels of specific interest in the five articles are the firm level (Njøs et al. 2016), the community level (Høvig 2016), the cluster level (Johns 2016; Murray & Overton 2016), and the level of regional and national innovation systems (Cooke 2016). Njøs et al. (2016) address the question of how an innovative low-tech Norwegian firm in the oil and gas industry changes from being a first mover to an innovation laggard, and whether this process can be reversed. Høvig (2016) discusses the assumption that the video game industry is a ‘footloose industry’ by analysing firm practices in a game-developer community of practice in Bergen, Norway. Johns (2016) takes a path-dependency approach to trace the evolutionary phases of a television cluster in Manchester, UK. Clustering processes are also the core of the analysis by Murray & Overton (2016), who combine established work on clusters and nascent research on ‘fictive place’ to explore the construction efforts of a craft beer cluster in Wellington, New Zealand. Finally, Cooke (2016) contributes to the discussion of innovation systems by assessing why official statistics seem to show that Norway is a poor innovator.

This special issue also elaborates upon the importance of diversity in studies of the economic landscape. Some of the early writings on evolutionary economic geography have been criticized for their focus on rigidity and lock-in, rather than on the multiple outcomes of a wide range of evolutionary patterns that may arise from an initial incident (Belussi & Sedita 2009). The economy is a system in flux, with constantly changing power relations, market positions, and discourses. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy, and competitiveness and efficiency are always context-dependent.

To elaborate upon the issue of diversity within evolutionary economic geography, we have selected articles illustrating how development paths vary both with and within places (i.e. communities, towns, cities, and regions). Our point of departure is that there is no fixed or prescribed developed path for an economic entity or system. Høvig (2016), for example, explicitly argues that it makes no sense to describe game developers in Bergen as disembedded from their surroundings because the contextual community practice seems to be behind their success; Njøs et al. (2016) describe a failure in terms of lock-in by referring to the concept of path-dependent development. They partly demonstrate that evolutionary economic geography is about how ‘the emergence of self-reinforcing effects steers a technology, industry, or regional economy along one “path” rather than another’ (Martin 2010, 3).

To elaborate further on diversity and variance in economic practice, several of the contributions to this volume emphasize the role of agency. For example, the article by Johns (2016) on clustering processes reveals the unique role of lead firms in cluster evolution, and Murray & Overton (2016) demonstrate the importance of a context-dependent local government strategy for cluster construction. The articles in this special issue also draw attention to the role of socially constructed concepts in studies of economic landscapes, such as ‘communities of practice’ (Høvig 2016), ‘fictive clusters’ (Murray & Overton 2016), and ‘measurements’ of innovation (Cooke 2016). Thus, in addition to conceptualizing how organizations, networks, clusters, and innovation systems develop along different paths, this issue discusses the relational or discursive dimensions of evolutionary economic geography (Fløysand et al. 2012; Kogler 2015).

In summary, the collection of articles in this issue demonstrate that taking an evolutionary perspective does not mean the same as viewing development as historically determined, but rather as a relational process characterized by diversity and driven by feedback, adaptations, and discourse. The articles also disclose that a more comprehensive understanding of evolutionary development assumes multiscalar analyses to elucidate the complexity and interdependency between different geographical scales. The generic wisdom that can be extracted from this is that knowledge production in evolutionary economic geography relies on our ability to develop context- and scale-sensitive methodologies that not only increase our understanding of the economic landscape, but also indicate how, when, and why the construction of path-dependent economic landscapes should be adjusted.