Determinación y comparación de complicaciones obstétricas y

Source: Author

Whilst these scales are not mutually exclusive, and can converge or correspond around comparable spaces, evidence from Southern Staffordshire suggests they are increasingly detached from the sub-national. They are however similarly detached from one another, intertwined but not fully overlain (Brenner, 2004); even when extending to national or international scales, these are more commonly a set of nodal archipelago or trans-local relationships (Sassen, 2004; Veltz, 2000), creating territories of distinction based around non-geographic forms of proximity (Boschma, 2005). They are similarly dynamic and transitional (Allen & Cochrane, 2007) as ongoing changes to industry and production impact spatial distribution and production processes through global commodity chains and production networks (Henderson et al, 2002; Gereffi et al, 2005; Sturgeon et al, 2008).

Networked Transactional

Factored

• knowledge

• regulation

• customers

• suppliers

• sites/premises

• labour

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This ongoing re-creation of spatial scales and detachment from articulations of the sub-national runs parallel to an embedded industrial aptitude or acumen occurring sub-sub-nationally (Capello, 1999; Cooke & Morgan, 1998). Emerging through the repositioning of specific skills within or between industries and the exploitation of critical industry know-how in diversification and development (Henry & Pinch, 2000), such skills become integral to ongoing processes of spatial re-creation and through this integration of the sub-national, reinforcing its continuity as a space. This however has a temporal dimension, and its efficacy to bind together the sub-national is time-bound, representing part of a slow stripping out of embedding factors for firms in Southern Staffordshire.

With the almost absolute erosion of markets as a foundation for spatial economy, instead localised iterations are rooted in the provision of key industrial factors (Peck, 1996; Phelps &

Alden, 1999; Potter & Moore, 2000). These however are also showing signs of erosion, gradually thinning out through structural shifts in the economy (Goos & Manning, 2003). The high quality skills considered difficult to replicate outside of Southern Staffordshire,

fundamental in the structural resilience of its manufacturing industry, have been eroded through an increasingly ageing workforce set for retirement and a limited replacement pool in both number and quality. This has seen firms look to attract external sources of labour to maintain this critical factor (Youtie & Shapira, 2008). In achieving this we see a broadening of interpretations of infrastructure conditions, linking basic factors of road, rail, sites and premises with a cultural infrastructure (Florida, 2002) seen as fundamental to Southern Staffordshire’s role in both maintaining its indigenous economy alongside contributing toward the wider city-region. These conditions provide the basis for a more personal form of integration, with interests translating as the protection and continuation of private investments

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in not only financial but emotional terms through firm sunk costs and the collective interests of principal personnel (Jensen, 1993; Clark & Wrigley, 1997b) (Fig. 5.5).

Figure 5.5: Temporal scales of firm activity: erosion of embedding factors

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The spatial distribution of key relationships for Southern Staffordshire firms suggests these occur beyond any clear or linear articulation of spatial economy (Henderson et al, 2002;

Piccaluga, 2004). Whilst this is most prominent at the sub-national scale, a similar

phenomenon can be identified at higher scales with firms instead interned in a set of nodal archipelago or trans-local relationships (Sassen, 2004; Veltz, 2000). In place of specific physical geographies, these spatial relations can be identified as taking two specific forms:

one spatial-functional, the other temporal. This spatial-functional form sees firm relationships

Markets

• Operations focused on strong supplier and customer

concentration within a defined spatial area, constructing an industrial region

Skills

• Key aptitudes in spatial area remnants of 'Markets' period, enabling critical services to compete and evolve through specialism within a wider or broader territory

Infrastructure

• Integration with dispersed commercial territory and replenishment of stripped-out skills base dependent on physical and cultural infrastructure

Personal

• Era of sunk costs and protection of interests at both corporate and individual level

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manifest at three specific scales: factored, representing key tangible dependencies,

transactional, linked to immediate forward and backward linkages, and networked, formed around the collation of knowledge inputs. Alongside this a temporal form runs, bound into stages and periods of structural evolution and (de)industrialisation at the sub-national scale.

5.6 Conclusion

This chapter has examined the picture of spaces of economic production as created through firm-based exchanges. Using a set of key firms from within a defined spatial boundary, it has examined where and how their important exchanges are occurring and how these are

integrated at the sub-national scale. In doing so it has argued the spatial integration of firms, rather than singular and embedded within any designated form of political unit, is constructed of multiple layers of individual firm exchanges which consolidate to form a constantly

renewing set of bespoke spaces (Hayter et al, 1999).

Whilst the picture of spatial economy created is consistent with relational concepts of multi-layered, dynamic or ‘phasing’ space (Allen et al, 1998; Brenner, 2004; Jones, 2009), still a number of structuring elements can be identified which allow us to understand the

relationships between firm and space. It also enables us to interpret what may manifest as critical junctures through which the bounded space of political administration meets the networked space of firm exchange.

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First, whilst the space of firm exchanges is presented as divergent to the spatial structuring of political units (Henderson et al, 2002; Piccaluga, 2004), certain tendencies are evident which serve to consolidate these concepts of relationally dispersed and territorially bound. The concept of nodal or trans-local relationships (Sassen, 2004; Veltz, 2000) – a set of enduring exchanges between specific non-contiguous industrial spaces – implies whilst spatial

economy transcends sub-national articulations, it has limitations and adheres to specific forms of demarcation, albeit through a set of remote specialist production archipelagos. Alongside these node-to-node patterns we also see the occurrence of extensive spaces, particularly at the national scale in line with the traditional division of commercial markets. These indicate firms operate within spatial parameters as defined by political units, but at a broader scale and more explicit to regulatory roles.

Second, interpreting how firms interact with and create individual spaces of economic production can be understood considering three distinct spatial-functional scales: Factored, Transactional and Networked. These FTN scales present different spatial permutations for firms extending from international dependencies down to the most localised. Whilst dynamic and therefore fluid in form (Allen et al, 1998; Jones, 2009), their dependencies imply specific spatial iterations evolving in line with shifting practices in production, regulation, and

communication (Arndt & Kierzkowski, 2001; Cairncross, 1997; Dicken, 2007; Jones et al, 2005; Markusen et al, 1999). The abstraction of such spatial articulation presents a distinct shift away from orthodox understandings of the sub-national presented through regional or city-regional concepts (Florida, 2008; Hall, 2003; Storper, 1997) and toward more diverse demarcations (Amin, 2004; Brenner, 2004; Kraemer, 2005).

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Finally, the nature of these FTN scales is influenced by a temporal dimension determining the extent to which they are sub-nationally integrated via endowments of resource. Such resource is an active part of sub-national spatial economy, representing a transition as stages of

industrial development progress and sub-national spatial economy and its needs are

re-articulated (Cox, 2010; Jones, 1997; Lundvall, 2005; Parr, 2001). This transition is integral to the extent which sub-national spaces are able to integrate economic actors through a changing temporal dynamic of embedding factors. The erosion of these factors at the sub-national scale, via industrial restructuring and political reformation (Bentley et al, 2010; Byrne, 1994;

Hudson, 2010; Jeffery, 2006) means integration is a periodic phenomenon as firms’ modes of practice and basis for embedding is in transition. As a result, as spaces of economic

production created through firm exchanges are in perpetual flux, similarly the form of

integration at the sub-national scale between space and firm is evolving. To address this, new approaches to governance have been adapted in recognition of this periodized and networked model of spatial economy. In the next chapter, I turn my attention to understanding the critical factors in creating spatial economy amongst spaces of economic governance.