This book discusses a core question in many fields of the social sciences, namely how to create, share and adopt new knowledge. It creates an original space for conversation between two lines of research that have developed largely in parallel for a long time: social network theory and the geography of knowledge. This book considers that relational thinking has become increasingly important for scholars to capture societal outcomes by studying social relations and networks, whereas the role of place, space and spatial scales has been somewhat neglected outside an emergent geography of knowledge.
The individual contributions help integrate network arguments of connectivity, geographical arguments of contiguity and contextuality into a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which people and organizations are constrained by and make use of space and networks for learning and innovation. Experts in the fields of geography, sociology, economics, political science, psychology, management and organizational studies develop conceptual models and propose empirical research that illustrates the ways in which networks and geography play together in processes of innovation, learning, leadership, and power.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Johannes Glückler is Professor of Economic and Social Geography and Fellow of the Marsilius Center of Advanced Studies at Heidelberg University. His research follows a relational perspective and builds on theories of organization, networks and institutions in the analysis of the space economy. He serves on several boards of journals in the field of economic geography as well as a partner of the Schader Foundation in the area of social network research. As part of the European ERASMUS Teaching Mobility program, he is a regular visiting professor at the University of Salamanca. He is also co-founder of the M.Sc. Governance of Risks and Resources at the Heidelberg Center for Latin America in Santiago de Chile. He recently co-authored, with Harald Bathelt, The Relational Economy, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Emmanuel Lazega is professor of sociology at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, a membre of the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CNRS), and current president of the European Academy of Sociology. His current research focuses on the dynamics of multilevel (individual and organizational) networks. He recently co-edited, with Tom A.B. Snijders, Multilevel Network Analysis for the Social Sciences: Theory, Methods and Applications, Springer, 2016.
Ingmar Hammer is research associate at the University of Heidelberg. He studied geography, business and GIS at the University of Stuttgart and wrote his diploma thesis on innovation networks in biotechnology. Furthermore, Ingmar Hammer has worked in various companies in the high-tech sector. Among his research interests are innovation and business networks, methods of the social network analysis and their application to the analysis of business networks as well as geographies of services.
