The Exaggerated Death of Geography

By K. Morgan. Geography, 2004

825 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT Globalisation and digitalisation have been presented as inescapable forces which signal the ‘death of geography’; this article takes issue with this fashionable narrative. The counter argument that ‘geography matters’ is pursued in three ways: first, by questioning the ‘distance-destroying’ capacity of infonnation and communication technologies, where social depth is conflated with spatial reach; second, by arguing that physical proximity may be essential for some forms of knowledge exchange; and third, by charting the growth of territorial innovation systems.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Political Science and International Relations, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/635b117169e0e19845a3649a3e427112b12642ed

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Citations in the corpus

Complex innovation policy systems: Towards an evaluation mix (2013, background): “The ‘de-territorialisation’ of socioeconomic relationships associated with globalisation (Scholte Jan, 2000) has simultaneously served to emphasise the importance of proximity-based relationships rooted in regional and local systems (Morgan, 2004; Scott Allen, 1998; Storper, 1997).”
Reward-based crowdfunding of entrepreneurial projects: the effect of local altruism and localized social capital on proponents’ success (2017, neutral): “First, proximity favors face-to-face interactions (Morgan 2004) through which a project’s proponent and backers can easily share relevant information about the project’s quality and the proponent’s reliability.”
Universities as key knowledge infrastructures in regional innovation systems (2006, background): “Much of recent thinking on processes of regional development stresses the role of knowledge as a development factor, often raising it to an overwhelming importance relative to more traditional factors such as labour and capital (Morgan, 2004).”
Spatiality, Built Form, and Creative Industry Development in the Inner City (2006, background): “These bounded terrains constitute manifestations of territorial innovation systems (Morgan, 2004) and are in some cases essentially congruent with long-established districts.”
Regions Matter: How Localized Social Capital Affects Innovation and External Knowledge Acquisition (2012, background): “However, out-of-region organizational boundary spanning is more difficult to handle in the case of innovation, given that it is likely to involve less face-to-face interaction because this is more costly over longer geographical distances (Morgan 2004).”
Innovation drivers, value chains and the geography of multinational corporations in Europe (2014, methodology): “For this purpose, our analysis considers the set of conditions that render some courses of actions easier than others (Morgan, 2004), making innovation prone interactions and institutions more likely in certain localities than in others.”
How to distinguish innovative suppliers? Identifying innovative suppliers as new task for purchasing (2006, background): “After the euphoria during the ebusiness “hype” this time there are indications of an exaggerated “death of distance” postulation as well (Morgan, 2004).”
Editorial: Role of Proximity in Interaction and Performance: Conceptual and Empirical Challenges (2005, background): “Others almost exclude the possibility that effective transfer of tacit knowledgeEMPIRICAL CHALLENGES can be accomplished at a geographical distance In scientific fields such as organization studies, innova- (M , 2004).”
The Spatial Dimension of Social Capital (2010, background): “This aspect of social capital, therefore, is very difficult to tap into for outsiders, which makes it a powerful source of local competitive advantage (cf. Morgan, 2004).”
The Regional Environment and a Firm’s Innovative Performance: A Plea for a Multilevel Interactionist Approach (2007, background): “…2004; Hendry and Brown 2006), industrial districts (Dei Ottati 1994; Markusen 1996; Kaufmann and Tödtling 2000), regional innovation systems (Cooke, Uranga, and Etxebarria 1997; Carlsson 2003), innovative milieu (Camagni 1991; Maillat 1995), and learning regions (Florida 1995; Morgan 1997).”
Distant networking: The knowledge acquisition strategies of 'out-cluster' biotechnology firms (2005, background): “…some authors argue that the proximity achieved by belonging at a distance to a ‘community’ has limitations, because virtual communications do not “offer the same scope for reciprocity, serendipity and trust that is afforded by sustained face-to-face contact” (Morgan, 2004, p. 12; Roberts, 2000).”
Building global knowledge pipelines: The role of temporary clusters (2006, background): “The establishment and management of global pipelines entail considerable uncertainties and high investments, not least because of differences in the cultural and institutional contexts in which the firms operate (Schoenberger, 1997; Gertler, 2001; Coe & Bunnell, 2003; Morgan, 2004).”
Formation and dissolution of inter-firm linkages in lengthy and stable networks in clusters (2015, background): “Innovation activities seem an exception to the death of distance resulting from the widespread adoption of modern ICT (Morgan, 2004).”