Abstract
Symbolic knowledge-driven innovations can play an important role in the economic development of cities and regions. Cultural events and infrastructures can act as powerful connectivity engines, generating new connections, rewiring links, and repositioning institutions/cities/regions on the Internet map. Within this framework, this paper aims to contribute to the analytical understanding of culture-led repositioning. For this purpose we perform regression analysis with cultural networks (observational cross-sectional network data) from digital media for a specific cultural case study: the Basque Culinary Center (BCC), a higher education faculty of haute cuisine promoted by the University of Mondragon along with a group of Michelin-starred chefs. Results show that a cultural sector, such as haute cuisine, can contribute to structural changes in connectivity patterns, putting an institution/city/region on the media map. It is the connection (in the online press) of the BCC to the influential Michelin-starred chefs that can fuel the accumulation of press articles (media items) on the BCC; and it is precisely this accumulation of press articles that can impact BCC revenues. Put differently, the co-branding between the influential Michelin chefs and the BCC may have put the BCC on the press map, promoting new student registrations and fostering Basque haute cuisine. The main contribution of this article is a prototype of regression analysis to test repositioning with network data.
Highlights
Breaking up path dependencies and lock-in effects is especially important in declining industrialized regions, caught up by radical disconnections and decline (Grabher [1])
The use of symbolic capital-driven innovations were seen as a priority in the efforts, in the case of Bilbao and the Basque Country, to overcome the challenges associated with an ageing, industrialized economy
The network is intra-connected at around 74%. This means that there is a higher number of connections between nodes after the opening of the Basque Culinary Centre (BCC), this does not necessarily imply causality
Summary
Breaking up path dependencies and lock-in effects is especially important in declining industrialized regions, caught up by radical disconnections and decline (Grabher [1]). In such cases culture could serve as one of the multiple remedies against the risks of regional lock-in effects (Heidenreich and Plaza [2]; Plaza and Haarich [3]) due to the fact that cultural goods can generate more symbolic associations and image connections than non-cultural consumption goods, since they are socially constructed (Potts et al [4]), with their meanings subject to collective cognitive processes of people/citizens. With the aim of turning around this negative scenario, a significant effort was made by the Basque government to construct a regional innovative infrastructure, which would foster the modernization of traditional industries and nurture new industrial and service activities (Cooke [5])
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