The networked economy of firms in city-region peripheries

Abstract

City-regions have become a core unit of analysis for spatial economy, providing an explicit link between bounded administrative units and more networked spaces of production. Too often, however, such analysis is focused on the core of the city-region, applying presumptions of gravity-based agglomeration. This paper examines these networked spaces of production from the city-region periphery, using a firm-based approach as critical determinants of spatial economy via their key interactions. Focused on the Greater Birmingham city-region, UK, the paper explores the integration of city-regional geography with firm-based networked economy. In doing so, it applies a set of networks of practice, focused on firms’ factored, transactional, and transitional dependencies. Using these networks of practice, it critically analyses the spaces of production formed through firm-based interactions, and their concomitance with city-regional designations. It makes two key contributions. First, it enhances the call for greater understanding of the relationship between core and periphery in the context of city-regions. Second, it argues that network-based approaches, which form spatial economy around firm interactions over administrative configurations, offer useful insight into understanding firm–place relationships which more conventional place-based approaches cannot.

The decoupling effect and shifting assemblages of English regionalism: Economic governance, politics and firm-state relations

“…These changed tendencies are bound into the legated process of governance reform and the outcome of preceding arrangements and interventions forming successive layers of production and governance relations (Massey, 1979). For example, actor relations formed through prior assemblages can create institutional memories underpinned by long-term state personnel (Jones et al, 2004), established transactional dependencies (MacKinnon et al, 2004; Salder, 2021), and embedded stakeholder interactions (Fung, 2015; Yuille, 2020). This may lead to non-human actors exerting influence on the assemblage via the bounded rationality of institutional and industrial practice (Johnson and Hoopes, 2003) and sunk costs of organisational investments, network formation, personal interests, and public goods (Biniari, 2017; Capello et al, 2011; Clark and Wrigley, 1997).…”

“…Alongside the dispersal of production has been reduced support for priority sectors, with implications for localised dependence. Declining local industries are routinely bypassed as stakeholders try to fashion more novel and iterative production and knowledge networks to compensate for changing market demand, resulting in an extending set of complex overlain multiplicities (Hamdouch et al, 2017; MacKinnon et al, 2004; Salder, 2021); the extended reach of such actors becomes focused beyond the regional assemblage, resultant of a shortage rather than provision of active support mechanisms.…”

The Core‐Periphery Structure in the Yangtze River Delta: An Enterprise Linkage Perspective, 1978–2019

“…However, only a few scholars have focused on the structural characteristics of metropolitan areas. Salder takes the Greater Birmingham area as an example to explore the relationship between the enterprise network and the city network, and in doing so, strengthened our understanding of the core-periphery relationship [31]. Yeh et al and Zhang et al employed the connection analysis of APS companies to conclude that the Pearl River Delta has a hierarchical structure with Guangzhou and Shenzhen as the central cities and used social network analysis to describe the characteristics of the cities [32,33].…”

Transformation of the System of Public Administration in a Network Economy

“…A networked economy is an environment in which any company or individual in any economic system can contact with minimal cost with any other company or individual about teamwork, trade, exchange of ideas, or just for fun (Salder, 2020;Salamova, 2020).…”