Recent research in economic geography has introduced two notions that historical studies should explore: regional resilience and related variety. Regional resilience refers to a region's ability to recover from external shocks. Related variety refers to the existence of related industrial sectors in a region, and the relatedness promotes economic development due to spill-overs between sectors. From an evolutionary perspective, external shocks result in new development paths in regions with related variety. This is a dynamic process well suited to historical studies. This article argues that historical studies can contribute to this literature by studying how related sectors interact in resilient regions. We propose that family firms may act as a micro-coordination mechanism by moving financial and human resources from one sector to another related sector as a response to shock. The paper develops this argument by studying how six major regional business families within ocean industries reacted to external shocks over time.

This article explores how agencification, in terms of increasing arm's length governance, may influence governance control with municipal serviceprovision if the principal and the agent develop different institutional logics. The basic expectation is that structural separation between principal and agent will challenge the principal's control of the agent, and that this challenge will be accentuated if the structural change also leads to cultural separation, conceptualised as different institutional logics. Our findings lead to the conclusion that the relationship between formal structure and institutional logics is reciprocal; structural separation creates a separation in culture and identity, thereby accentuating the perceived distance between principal and agent, which stimulates their sense of belonging to different types of organisations. Still, development of appropriate control mechanisms is in its infancy. Formally, output control exists, but receives scarce political attention. Informal control may also work depending on adherence to a common community logic.

Corporatization implies disintegration of public authority, leading to not only structural but also cultural differentiation of government, transforming it into a fragmented and hybrid governance system consisting of an authority and multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous operators. This article addresses corporatization at the local government level in Norway, exploring if and how this change in formal structure triggers the emergence of separate cultures in the operator entities. Described as an institutionalization process, new norms, cognitions and identities seem to develop in these entities, creating a sense of 'us' (the municipal company) and 'them' (the municipality), thus strengthening the regulative separateness through normative and culturalcognitive elements. Findings from our multiple-case study indicate that this process may be relatively fast and strong, transforming local government into a system comprising various hybrid types, especially segregated and assimilated types. The stronger the structural differentiation is, the stronger cultural differentiation seems to be.

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