Thesis-2005-Faulconbridge.pdf (3.14 MB)
Local-global geographies of tacit knowledge production in London and New York's advertising and law professional service firms
thesis
posted on 2013-11-29, 11:48 authored by James R. FaulconbridgeFor economic geographers interest in the role of knowledge in economic activities and
a ‘knowledge economy’ raises questions about how geography enables (and disables)
learning and whether the production of tacit knowledge has exclusively local or multiple
overlapping geographies. This thesis engages with this debate and considers its
relevance to the geographies of tacit knowledge production (learning) in the employees
of global advertising and law professional service firms operating in London and New
York City. It begins by critically engaging with theories of knowledge, learning and
their geographies to develop a spatially sensitive approach to examine learning. Such
an analysis is then applied in order to understand the geographies of knowledge
production in global advertising and law firms. Three themes are addressed. First,
why is tacit knowledge important in the work of these firms? Second, what are the key
practices involved in producing such knowledge? Third, what are the geographies of
these practices and how important is the local scale (the communities within London
and New York) and the global scale (the communities stretched between offices of the
global firms studied) for knowledge production. Research findings from semistructured
interviews highlight the multiple geographies of learning in the firms studied
at both local and global scales. This is enabled by a number of ‘embedding’ forces
that ‘smooth’ the learning process and that have multiple geographies themselves. It
is therefore argued that a relational and topological analysis that traces the learning
networks across space most usefully provides insights into the geographies of
knowledge production. This reveals that the ‘networks and spaces of learning’ are fluid
and transcend spatial scales when suitable constructed.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Geography and Environment
Publisher
© James R FaulconbridgePublication date
2005Notes
A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.EThOS Persistent ID
uk.bl.ethos.418390Language
- en