Beyond Soft Institutionalism: Accumulation, Regulation, and Their Geographical Fixes

By G. Macleod. 2001

222 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This author offers a circumspect appraisal of the recent controversies surrounding an ‘institutional turn’ in economic geography and urban and regional studies. He contends that, although the prevailing institutionalist perspectives undoubtedly yield many welcome innovations and useful departures, they are also beset by certain conceptual difficulties. These include, first, a thin political economy most discernible in the failure to appreciate fully the crucial role of the state in shaping the urban – regional process, and a related weakness in examining the asymmetries of power which enframe the governance of space economies. Second, there is a danger of drifting towards a soft institutionalism: a tautological trap that could invite researchers and policymakers mistakenly to envisage the presence or otherwise of a regional ‘institutional thickness’ or a local ‘social capital’ as an adequate explanation of uneven economic development. It is then contended that one relatively mature but continually evolving institutionalist political – economic framework, the Regulation Approach, might help to redress these deficits and to illuminate further our understanding of urban – regional economic change. Recent contributions examining the shifting geographies of accumulation and the rescaling of regulation are viewed to be particularly germane in this regard.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/978d7852dcd0fe2131143fbc9ea451c276dbd64e

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Citations in the corpus

Devolution, constitutional change and economic development: Explaining and understanding the new institutional geographies of the British state (2005, methodology): “This is something of a lost opportunity, b; J, 2001b, 2002; J , 2001; ML, 2001a; B et al., 2003; J and ML ,and it could be argued that devolution presents an ideal circumstance in which to develop geographically 2004) this paper will be restricted to drawing out some of the concerns that arise when…”
Relational Economic Geography: A Partial Understanding or a New Paradigm? (2008, background): “Many studies showed a tendency to assume, rather than demonstrate, that relational assets are the key to regional economic growth (Overman 2004), but relational assets and “strong ties” are rarely an adequate explanation of uneven economic development (MacLeod 2001; Grabher 1993).”
Advancing Evolutionary Economic Geography by Engaged Pluralism (2014, methodology): “This term has sometimes been used in contrast to ‘new institutionalism’ that tends to focus on ‘softer’ institutions, such as networks, knowledge and trust (MACLEOD 2001).”
Whither Global Production Networks in Economic Geography? Past, Present, and Future (2006, methodology): “This line of analysis has been reinvigorated in the `new regionalism' literature in geography since the mid-1990s (see MacLeod, 2001), although, until recently, the precise connection between regional development and GPNs remained underdeveloped (see Coe et al, 2004).”
‘Globalizing’ regional development: a global production networks perspective (2004, background): “Over the last two decades there has been a well-documented resurgence of interest in the region as a site of economic interaction and innovation, and thereby economic development (for overviews see MacLeod, 2001; Scott, 1998; Storper, 1995).”
Power Relations, Industrial Clusters, and Regional Transformations: Pan-European Integration and Outward Processing in the Slovak Clothing Industry (2003, background): “Absent from many considerations of clusters and regional growth, as from most conventional discussions of transition policy in East-Central Europe (Smith 1998), is a treatment of the potential for economic democratization within (and beyond) commodity production (MacLeod 2001, 1154).”
Trust and Networking in Inter-firm Relations: the Case of Eco-industrial Development (2003, background): “For example, while one criticism of such approaches is the limited role given to the state (see MacLeod, 2001a), accounts of ecoindustrial development do see a key role for the state and most EIP commentators agree that public policy has a central role to play in establishing the framework…”
Chains and networks, territories and scales: towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy (2001, background): “Recent work on the production and politics of scale has cogently argued that the process of globalization in economic activity has led to the ‘relativization of scale’ (Jessop 1999; see also Amin 1997, 1998; Brenner 1998, 1999; Kelly 1999; MacLeod 2001; MacLeod and Goodwin 1999; Swyngedouw 1997, 200”
Institutional Thickness Revisited (2017, background): “…the concept of institutional thickness is not without its shortcomings, and interestingly, apart from a few notable exceptions (see, e.g., MacLeod 2001; Coulson and Ferrario 2007; Beer and Lester 2015), over the past few years, surprisingly little has been done to further elaborate on…”
On the ‘economic dividend’ of devolution (2005, background): “While accept the social, political and cultural factors thatsome nation-states have simply witnessed a discontiprovide the wider context for their operation (S,nuity or gradual erosion of the centre’s dominance, 1985, 1995; ML , 2001).”