Firms in Territories: A Relational Perspective*

Abstract The role of space and place in shaping the transformation of firms and industries and the impact of such transformations on the wider processes of territorial development at local, regional, national, and global scales are basic research issues in economic geography. Such analyses tend to be compartmentalized, focusing on a specific economic activity or on a specific territory, rather than on the relationships between them. It is difficult simultaneously to conceptualize economic activities (including such phenomena as firms, industries, and other types of systems of networked economic activity), on the one hand, and territorially defined economies, on the other. In this paper, we address the interconnections between economic activities and territories through an exploration of the mutually constitutive relationships between firms and territories: the firm-territory nexus. The focus of our analysis is the nexus of three major dimensions—firms, industrial systems, and territories—embedded in turn in the overall macro dimension of governance systems.

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