Abstract
ABSTRACT This article analyses how a pair of nineteenth century commodity exchanges—in Chicago and New Orleans—shaped the sociotechnical infrastructures underlying two key types of market information—price quotations and crop statistics. Specifically, the paper investigates why these exchanges saw divergent outcomes, each successfully developing one information infrastructure but not the other. Prior scholarship has understood infrastructural development as the result of idiosyncratic, social structural alignments in actors’ resources and desires. This paper, by contrast, examines how such structural elements interacted with practical resources available to exchanges based on their roles within infrastructures. Findings demonstrate that the exchanges gained influence in proportion to their discretion over an infrastructure's everyday operations and the market routines these enabled. This ‘infrastructural power', or lack thereof, interacted with social structural resources in two distinct forms— ‘feedback’ in New Orleans and ‘sacrifice’ in Chicago—providing or denying each exchange the ability to shape infrastructures to its advantage. These findings suggest that analysts should pay closer attention to market dynamics as they relate to ‘infrastructure in action’.
Highlights
Henry Yeung’s Regional Studies Annual Lecture paper (Yeung, 2020) aims to link and mutually reinforce two of the most influential current strands at the heart of regional studies and economic geography.One is the omnipresent evolutionary economic geography (EEG), which has grown out of the work of a cluster of researchers at Utrecht University (e.g., Boschma, 2004; Boschma & Frenken, 2006; Boschma & Lambooy, 1999; Boschma & Martin, 2007; Frenken & Boschma, 2007)
The Regional Studies Annual Lecture 2020 paper by Henry Yeung proposes building bridges across both strands to improve our understanding of the uneven distribution and evolution of economic activity across the world
He puts forward the concept of strategic coupling as the foundation of such bridges. In this reply I argue that strategic coupling will not suffice, unless the variations in costs and incentives for engaging in networks and the different capacity of cities and regions to assimilate the benefits of innovation diffusion through networks are taken into consideration
Summary
Costs, incentives, and institutions in bridging evolutionary economic geography and global production networks To cite this article: Andrés Rodríguez-Pose (2021) Costs, incentives, and institutions in bridging evolutionary economic geography and global production networks, Regional Studies, 55:6, 1011-1014, DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2021.1914833 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2021.1914833
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