Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The relationship between geography and the creation, use, and reproduction of knowledge has been at the core of this book series. The previous twelve volumes have focused, among other topics, on the role that creativity, culture, power, networks, science and universities have in cultivating an understanding of how the social process of knowing unfolds in space. They all draw attention to ways in which this process is situated in places and how learning connects people across places. Centering on institutions, volume 13 presents yet another perspective on the spatiality of human knowledge. Across the social sciences scholars have been attributing to institutions a major part in social, political, cultural, and economic development. Although there is agreement on the importance of institutions, there are several understandings of what institutions are and how they influence social life. The purpose of this volume is to examine a rather neglected and only recently acknowledged dimension in institutional theory: the spatiality of institutions, the spatiotemporal dynamics of institutional change, and the role of institutions in the creation and reproduction of knowledge and related social outcomes in bounded territories.

Scholarship on institutions across the social sciences faces a set of fundamental dilemmas. On the one hand, it needs to explain how institutions change. Yet explanations of change which point to external factors run the risk of reducing institutions to a mere transmission belt for other, more fundamental causes. On the other, it needs to explain how institutions can have meaningful consequences. Yet in practice it is often hard to distinguish the institutions that cause a particular behavior from that behavior itself. In this chapter, the author shows how, these dilemmas affect the relatively discrete approaches to institutions offered by rational choice, historical institutionalist and sociological institutionalist accounts. He map out the different ways in which authors have sought to resolve these dilemmas and then briefly outlines an alternative approach that borrows from evolutionary theory and an understanding of institutions as congregations of beliefs to offer a better answer to these problems.

The organizational field has become an influential construct in management theory. Despite its prominence, the construct has defied precise definition. Most definitions emphasize either structural elements of fields (fields as place) or their ideational elements (fields as meaning systems). Missing from this analysis is an appreciation of how meaning is given to structural relations. The authors’ core thesis is that memory is a critically important bridging construct through which meaning is given to place. They demonstrate that organizational fields are historical accretions of shared memories that are reproduced and become objectified over time until they acquire the status of ontological reality. The term mnemonic fields is introduced to capture the understanding that fields are cognitions of network relations that are created, maintained and changed through processes of collective remembering.

The chapter introduces a French approach, economics of convention, which is an institutional way of integrating pragmatist and structuralist concepts for the analysis of economic production, distribution, and consumption. The author presents its two core models: the system of quality conventions and the worlds of production. Both systematize logics of coordination and valuation. Other concepts such as form investment and global value chains are discussed. Economics of convention criticizes the externalist perspective on institutions as transaction-cost theory does. From the standpoint of economics of convention, the meaning of institutions is incomplete, and competent actors mobilize conventions to handle institutions in situations. The approach’s situationalist perspective brings in an internalist concept of institutions. Economics of convention can thereby combine the analysis of institutions with the analysis of empirical normativity that conventions represent. Conventions can be regarded as the deeper structures of economic knowledge. Finally, the article presents ongoing trends and perspectives of economics of convention.

This chapter deals with a unique Basque invention—the gastronomic society, sometimes also referred to as the cooking society (in Spanish, ; in Basque, ). The author gives a brief overview of the historical origins of the and its developments until the present time and discusses the formal and informal dimensions of the that give life to the institution. He also notes the homogenization and differentiation processes that explain some of the cultural peculiarities of the Basque Country and its culinary geography and history. The chapter concludes with an attempt to contextualize the phenomenon of the gastronomic society, particularly in relation to the unique position that the occupies as an institution between the public and the private sphere.

This chapter explores the dynamic nature of institutions in response to changes in regulations and the institutional context. Seeking to refine the understanding of how and to which extent institutions change or sustain, the authors dismantle two institutions by analyzing the dynamics of their form and function separately. They propose a simple taxonomic model that helps explain how institutions can either sustain their form while their function responds to a changing institutional context (institutional drift) or, vice versa, retain their function while adapting their form to an altered context (institutional morphosis). Empirically, the latter case is illustrated by public procurement in Germany’s construction sector, whereas the journeyman years of artisans serve as an example of drift. The authors thus adopt an endogenous perspective and foster finer-grained concepts of institutional change that might help improve the understanding of the workings of policies that are at odds with or consistent with the underlying institutional reality.

In this study the authors analyze a protected label of origin cluster in France with a homogeneous and explicit institutional framework. The cluster has given birth to both incremental and radical changes in recent decades. By assessing these change processes, the authors disentangle different types of institutional change that have been shaped by preconditions in the cluster—and that in turn shape the cluster on an aggregate level. The study mainly focuses on inefficiencies that emerge over time in the given institutional framework, triggering different types of change. The study’s findings suggest that incremental change processes originate primarily in developments in the regulative and normative dimension of institutions within the cluster, whereas radical change processes require a wider set of preconditions.

The author examines how the production of art may constitute an important form of institutional work and legitimating rhetoric for institutional change. With a case study on the design process of a work of art calling to mind the common responsibility to protect the Baltic Sea, she identifies three mechanisms through which an artistic form of institutional work is performed. They are (a) creating emotional response by generating a sense of nostalgia over a lost common experience, (b) educating by constructing a mnemonic device that educates the audience and constructs the commons as a shared category, and (c) empowering that gives marginalized actors power to participate in protecting the commons. The study shows how artists, through their art, contribute to the creation of a shared material and symbolic space that helps construct mutual responsibility for collective resources such as the world’s seas and oceans.

The author explores the relevance of “place” in institutional field dynamics by examining how actors working in the Israeli high-tech industry construct the meaning and implications of its location. She finds that place is a rich construct that goes far beyond geography and includes culture, character, and values. The discourse of space is plurivocal, offering multiple, sometimes contradictory or ambivalent depictions of the meaning and consequences of location and of the local and global more generally. Place is therefore not given. It is used by institutional actors in different, sometimes contradictory ways, in their abiding efforts to define their identity as part of institutional work.

As an economy undergoes structural change, the focus of innovation changes to different technologies and different industries. Innovation is uneven over time and over places, leading to a tendency for incomes to diverge between innovative places and less innovative places, and to selectivity or turbulence in the pattern of employment and income change from one period to the next. This is the problem of the “innovation transitions” of regional economies. The author carries out a detailed comparative study of two regions—Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area—from 1970 forward, exploring why one region was more successful in its innovation transition than the other. He argues that the staples of urban and regional economics and economic geography offer only partial explanations, and that the divergent outcomes observed are better accounted for by different institutional factors that he labels the “relational infrastructure” of the two regions.