The geography of knowledge revisited: geographies of KIBS use by a new rural industry

ABSTRACT

It is difficult to define, let alone locate, knowledge. Research in regional studies suggests that cities are the focus of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), attract knowledge workers, and concentrate research and development (R&D) and universities: the implication is that knowledge is created in and diffused from urban centres. We suggest this may be a consequence of only studying knowledge that is relevant to, and used by, city-based industries: a growing number of researchers show that some types of knowledge are generated in non-urban or small-town clusters. This study focuses on the geography of KIBS (a proxy for knowledge inputs) used by Canadian winemakers (an emerging sector located in rural areas). After questioning what is meant by ‘knowledge’, we show that services incorporating knowledge of different types are sourced from different types of location. We conclude that there is no single geography of knowledge: for winemakers, different types of knowledge are sourced from cities, wine regions and also dispersed non-urban areas.

KEYWORDS:

• geography of knowledge
• new rural industry
• knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS)
• definitions of knowledge

JEL:

• D89
• L84
• R19

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There are a few local cooperatives and aggregators, but all are closely associated with local vineyards. There is not yet sufficient grape production for large winemaking companies to move in.

2. We aggregated the Nova Scotia (n = 6) with Quebec (n = 58) for the purpose of the analysis. These two provinces have the coolest weather and their wineries are more recently established.

3. The province of Quebec has no DVAs. The principal concentration of wineries is in Brome-Missisquoi (Doloreux & Frigon, 2019).

4. Multilevel analysis was run in SAS 9.2 (Proc GLIMMIX).

5. Statistics Canada tables 14-10-000-98-01 (jobs in cities, 2018) and 14-10-0291-01 (total jobs in Canada, August 2018).

 

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant (file number 435-2017-1042).