L4 - economy as social and cultural process 1: actors and networks Flashcards
Actor-network theory
Callon, 1987
actor network is simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogenous elements’ of humans and non-humans ‘and a network that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of
Concepts of power and space
Allen, 1997
As capacity - centred conception
- power over; possessed by virtue of social relationships
As medium = networked conception
- power to; produced or generated by groups or institutions
As technology - diagrammatic conception
- power on; exercised through groups and institutions but not centred in them
EADS-BAE example
EADS = plane sourcing (Europe)
BAE = security (UK)
- if merger between them = shifts in power for all actors involved (state, firms, workers, civil society)
US capitalism characteristics
- free-enterprise liberalism
- liberal democracy/divided gov
- decentralised, open markets
German capitalism characteristics
- Social partnership
- social democracy, weak bureaucracy
- organised markets, tiers of firms
Japan capitalism characteristics
- technonationalism
- developmental democracy, strong bureaucracy
- guided, closed markets, bank-centred capital markets
Key characteristics of business systems
Ownership coordination - primary means of ownership control - extent of ownership integration of production chains and sectors Non-ownership coordination - extent of alliance coord of production chains - amount of cola between competitors Employment relations and work management - employer-employee interdependence - delegation to and trust of employees
Key institutions of business systems
- the state
- financial system
- skill dev and control system
- trust and authority relations
Globalisation and business systems
Whitley, 1999
- think about effects of internationalisation on TNCs and their domestic business systems, effects of inward FDI on host business systems, effects of financial market internationalisation on business system characteristics and establishment of new cross-national business systems
Embedding the economy
Karl Polyani
- diagram in notes
Embeddedness and the role of the local/regional scale
Institutional thickness
- Strong institutional presence
- High levels of interaction
- Mutual awareness of being involved in a common (regional) enterprise
Social capital and trust
- Spatial proximity as a prerequisite to create trust
- Face-to-face interaction necessary to foster the share of tacit knowledge
BUT = danger of ‘over-territorialising’ the very concept
Globalisation: a process of disembedding?
Assumption by Giddens
Globalisation leads to disembedding of formerly locally anchored interaction.
Mechanisms of disembedding: creation of symbolic tokens and installation of expert systems
Problem:
Based on the same territorial logic of embeddedness as some previous approaches. Crucial arguments are neglected:
- Trust is highly important especially for social and economic relations across large distances
- Cultural proximity facilitates the creation of relationships across large distances (common roots, norms, advance trust)
Neither do globalisation processes necessarily lead to disembedding, no is embeddedness a purely local-regional phenomenon
Typology of embeddedness
- Polanyi’s great transformation is societal embedded
- new Econ sociology (organisation and business studies) is network and societally embedded
- business systems are socially and territorially embedded
- economic geography and new regionalism is territorially and network embedded
Geographies of politics and scale: shaping space
- Continuous re-negotiations of power between the agents shaping spatial orgnaisation
- Contexts of agency at all scales, from the local through to the global
- A priori delimitable spaces as scales of human agency, the so-called ‘Container Spaces’ are losing importance
