Keywords TEMPORARY CLUSTER, TRADE FAIRS, REWIRING, SOCIAL NETWORKS, TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL RELATIONS
ProblemThe parallelism of increasing globalization of economic relationships and the growing number of events in the creative economy such as trade fairs and congresses is the point of departure for this article. The current literatures of economic geography and organization studies portray the relationship between these two developments in three ways: these events fulfil the functions of (1) market locations for commercial transaction, (2) moments of institutional configuration of organizational fields, and (3) temporary clusters where suppliers, customers and competitors seek and exchange knowledge. This article goes on to elaborate a fourth central function of business events, which is closely related to the reconstitution of global industry networks, namely the rewiring of