Urban concentration and labour market linkages in the Norwegian ICT services sector

ABSTRACT

Building on research that emphasizes the dependence of services firms on the networks and experiences of individual employees, this paper investigates the urban concentration of information and communication technology services employment in Norway from the perspective of labour market linkages. It finds that urban regions generally provide firms with access to sector-specific expertise. Beyond this, intrinsic region characteristics determine the position of individual firms in national labour markets for expertise: Firms in the dominant university town have strong contact points to academic labour markets, whereas firms in the industrial stronghold of the Western Capital region exploit a broader range of recruitment channels than firms in any of the other urban and non-urban locations. The results illustrate how capability building through recruitment is influenced by local conditions, and imply that the industry will continue to concentrate in the large-city regions where surrounding organizations provide firms with priveliged access to expertise. Implications for research, innovation policy and societal development more generally are drawn.

KEYWORDS:

• ICT services
• urbanization
• expertise
• recruitment
• Norway

Acknowledgements

Tore Sandven assisted with data preparation, and Bjørnar Sæther with comments and frequent discussions. This support is gratefully acknowledged, as are the thoughtful comments received on earlier versions of this paper from two anonymous reviewers and the Editor.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Please not that this refers to the organizational structure of the legal ‘enterprise’ entity, not its ownership structure. Thus, it does not capture whether the enterprise belongs to a larger (foreign or domestic) enterprise group defined as several legal enterprise entities with a common ownership structure.

2 Data disclosure rules prohibit us from breaking down this employment data on different regions.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article benefitted from funding from the Research Council of Norway under the DEMOSREG program, project number 209769.