The behavioural foundations of urban and regional development: culture, psychology and agency

Abstract

Urban and regional development theory is largely rooted in explanations based on the location, agglomeration and organisation of firms, industries and capital. Contemporary economic geography theory, however, is moving toward a (re)turn to addressing the role of behaviour in determining urban and regional development outcomes. This paper focuses on the concepts of culture, personality psychology, and agency in order to understand how these behavioural factors interact and result in development differentials across cities and regions. It is argued that individual and collective behaviour and human agency are based on a rationality that is spatially bounded. Furthermore, it is proposed that psychocultural behavioural patterns provide a basis for understanding the type and nature of human agency within cities and regions. It is argued that such agency is one of the key rooted drivers of urban and regional development.

Big Data, artificial intelligence and the geography of entrepreneurship in the United States

“…This is notwithstanding the fact that theories on local entrepreneurial eco-systems and regional differences in entrepreneurial activity increasingly highlight the role of local behavioural and psychological foundations as a crucial determinant of economic outcomes (Fitjar and Rodríguez-Pose, 2011;Huggins & Thompson, 2017;Saxenian, 1994;Sternberg, 2009). The mismatch between a booming individual-level research on personality and entrepreneurship and the disregard for its local and regional dimension is possibly a consequence of the persistence phenomenon in regional entrepreneurship research.…”

“…Other research examining the origins of current differences in entrepreneurial culture assessed by means of geographical differences in the entrepreneurial personality profile indicate that a historical concentration of large-scale industries dominating entire regions over many decades has shaped the local psychology, which then affects the region's entrepreneurial activity today . The mechanisms behind this impact are agentic and social processes stimulating entrepreneurial thinking and acting as well as a certain entrepreneurial culture in local populations (Huggins & Thompson, 2017). …”

“…Although we "only" study regional personality indirectly, by solely focusing on psychological patterns in social media language, we expect -informed by similar Big Data research on regional psychological patterns measured with social media and predicable effects on regional outcomes (Curini, Iacus, & Canova, 2015;Sylwester & Purver, 2015) -to find a similar pattern as that from entrepreneurship research based on self-report questionnaires. So, in other words, we assume that artificial intelligence methods are indeed effective in translating local language patterns, used in social media, into reliable markers of regional entrepreneurial activity (e.g., the entrepreneurial personality profile) and thus into markers of entrepreneurial culture (if one accepts the notion that regional personality differences reflect important aspects of regional cultural differences, Hofstede & McCrae, 2004;Huggins & Thompson, 2017;McCrae, 2001). We thus expect: H1: Local language patterns translated via artificial intelligence methods into local differences in an entrepreneurial personality profiles can uncover county entrepreneurship rates (positive effect of the profile on entrepreneurship rates).…”

“…We also contribute to the emerging literature linking Big Data and social media to entrepreneurship (e.g., Tata, Martínez, García, Oesch, & Brusoni, 2017). Second, we push forward the entrepreneurship research studying the role of personality (Brandstätter, 2011) and regional psychological characteristics (Audretsch et al, 2017;Davidsson, & Wiklund, 1997;Huggins & Thompson, 2017) by using Big Data methods (Zomaya & Sakr, 2017). Third, we extend the research on Big Data's usefulness in the study of personality and behavioural and psychosocial outcomes (e.g., Eichstaedt et al, 2015;Kosinski & Behrend, 2017;Kosinski, Wang, Lakkaraju, & Leskovec, 2016;Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012;Youyou, Kosinski, & Stillwell, 2015) by demonstrating that social media encodes relevant psychological information that can predict economic activity, in addition to other outcomes such as health , happiness (Curini, Iacus, & Canova, 2015), or political orientation (Sylwester & Purver, 2015).…”

“…This attention has, according to Huggins & Thompson (2017), spurred an interest in new measures and aspects of culture taken from psychological research, such as regional personality differences (Hofstede & McCrae, 2004;McCrae, 2001;Rentfrow, Gosling, Jokela, Stillwell, Kosinski, & Potter, 2013) and in how personality differences in the cultural make-up of territories affect regional economic trajectories (Lee, 2017;.…”