You do not know what you have until it is gone: The importance of face-to-face interactions in local economic development

ABSTRACT

To contain the 2019 coronavirus, many localities were placed on lockdown and were required to follow social distancing guidelines implemented by upper-level governments. A consequence of these containment measures was that local practitioners had to conduct economic development remotely, an activity traditionally centered around face-to-face interactions. Thus, this raises the question, how important is face-to-face contact for local economic development? To answer this question, in-depth interviews were conducted with thirty-seven senior management economic development practitioners in the Province of Ontario, Canada from 2019 to 2020. The analysis found that face-to-face contact is highly important for practitioners’ economic development efforts because it, among other things, facilitates the creation and transmission of tacit knowledge between practitioners as well as with businesses, community organizations, and other stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Face-to-face contact
• remote work
• practitioners
• COVID-19 pandemic
• Ontario

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants of the study, their partner in the study, the Economic Developers Council of Ontario (EDCO), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for providing financial support. They are grateful to Judith Sutton and Ruby Dhillon for their comments on the initial version. The authors also thank the editor of the journal and three anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments and helped to improve the initial version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).