Re-framing Regional Development

Evolution, Innovation and Transition

Philip Cooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136223037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Turbulence characterises the current global scene. This book uses complementary theoretical approaches to understand and help prescribe policies to 're-frame' the regional development problem in turbulent times. These approaches are: evolutionary complexity; evolutionary economic geography; emergence theory; and resilience theory. From below, they address the four major crises creating a 'perfect storm' for societies and economics involving: the climate change crisis; the energy crisis; the banking and financial crisis; and the global economic crisis.

This book analyses and proposes ways in which regional economies, in particular, are having to be 'reframed' to address these crises. First, many must evolve in new ways, possibly moving back from the 'service economy' towards a new, greener form of manufacturing of goods as well as services. Accordingly, regional economies are innovating in new ways. Amongst these are the quest for 'relatedness' within their own regional orbits, and promoting 'modularity' as a mode of analysis and a policy stance to stimulate innovation across industry and geographical borders.

Finally, regional economies and societies are discovering that, from a 'resilience' perspective, they must find answers to the higher levels of governance with which they increasingly struggle. In this respect regional economies are in 'transition' and regional processes are 'emergent'. The transition seeks to address the four crises, involving re-balancing, re-directing and re-framing future policy and practice. This book describes many of the novel 'framings' involved in understanding the new ways in which this major task is being addressed in theory, policy and everyday practice.

1Introduction

Complex systems integration, ‘emergence’, and policy modularisation

Philip Cooke

Introduction

This book assembles the thoughts of a substantial number of leading intellectuals whose careers have been devoted to understanding regional development processes and, for many, reflection upon what might be useful policy suggestions, advice or interventions to optimise regional evolution. To a greater or lesser extent, all are fascinated with the project of the book, which is to ‘reframe’ regional development, and their chapters give expression to this interest and perspective. This does not mean that all chapters are written according to a specific ‘new order’. Rather, the majority are, to a greater or lesser extent, experiments in thinking about regional development from the viewpoints of four innovative macro-perspectives or ‘frames’. In some cases, the frames selected are sufficiently complementary that they can be, and are used in the same chapter without difficulty. So what are they? In the order they are introduced below they include: evolutionary complexity theory; evolutionary economic geography; emergence theory; and resilience theory. The great ‘reframing’ all have made is to recognise the veracity of Beinhocker’s (2006) devastating conclusion from his major critical review of ‘Traditional Economics’ that its early founding fathers, Walras and Jevons, in their desperation to deploy prevailing physico-mathematic reasoning, led the field up a blind alley for more than a hundred years.

This happened because their physico-mathematics stopped with the first law of thermodynamics, otherwise known as the Conservation of Energy, which explained how everything in the physical world consumes, reincarnates but cannot augment energy. The tendency of all action or agency is towards closed system equilibrium and stasis. If this sounds like a different terminology for ‘death’, the thought was already expressed by complex systems pioneer John Holland at the first meeting of economists and physicists to discuss this at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. The latter group received the ‘framing’ of what ‘Traditional Economics’ had achieved with a surprising mixture of astonishment and awe. Surprising for the economists was the analogy some drew between what they had just heard and a visit some once made to Cuba. For them Havana, particularly, presented the experience, common to Americans but also others, of stepping back fifty years in time. Long-disappeared car brands, such as, Studebaker, Packard and De Soto as well as vintage Chevrolets and Fords still plied the streets, patched up with tractor parts where originals could not be found or re-made. Just as tourists wondered at the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics in keeping such heirlooms on the road and functioning, the physicists were awestruck that economics had yet to integrate the second law of thermodynamics, let alone quantum mechanics in its physico-mathematical reasoning. Yet they were professing to describe modern economic processes through the frame of an idea first aired by Joule and others in the 1840s.

Framing and ‘reframing’ are not always so time-bound, but inevitably time is involved in the latter process. Ironically, time was comprehended in a new way when Lord Kelvin proposed the second law of thermodynamics, a little after the foundations of ‘closed system’ economics had been finished. Kelvin’s insight was that in open systems, like our world, energy and everything else dissipates into a disorderly end condition (‘rust never sleeps’) of entropy. This allowed a reframed consciousness of the meaning of time. Because without the concept of entropy, including even the weathering of solid rocks, differentiation of past, present and future could not be accomplished (Beinhocker 2006: 68). The notion of ‘entropy’, which the second law captures as the irreversible tendency for things to fall apart, is central to the thought chains that are further explored under the rubrics of complexity, evolution, emergence and resilience in the chapters comprising this volume. But reframing can happen swiftly, especially in modern fields of knowledge. Most people would think of biotechnology as a relatively new and influential field. The discovery of DNA is considered by many to be the apotheosis of modern scientific inquiry. But it, and its claims to supremacy in the field of evolutionary biology, are equally prone to the criticism that they represent a cul-de-sac rather than an open, expanding vista. Consider the following:

the double-helical DNA of Watson and Crick, the discovery of the ‘genetic code’ and the formulation of the theses that came to be known as the ‘Central Dogma’ of molecular biology, which proclaims the unidirectional flow of ‘information’ from DNA to RNA to protein … was preformationist (… the ‘ghost in the chromosomes’); genocentric (it located agency exclusively in the genes); and reductionist (… ‘we are our genes’)

(Hendrickson 2011: 48)

This can sound almost familiar to anyone sceptical of ‘Traditional Economics’ with its linear (for example, mechanical causality), preformationist (for example, rational economic ‘man’); genocentric (for instance, utility maximisation) and reductionist (for example, consumer preference) master narratives.

However, this framing of the ‘Central Dogma’ is in crisis and being undermined by the ‘Systems Biology Perspective’ (SBP). Among the new views arising from the large amount of data, including the Human Genome Project, generated by molecular biology into the complexity of living systems are; the importance of context, connectivity, emergence, distributed causality and self-organising systems. This means such assumptions as the organism ‘unfolding’ preformed from its DNA coil is replaced by the idea that each organism is a novelty/ innovation; that only the genes count for everything is replaced by the notion of agency being distributed about the whole organism; and reductionism is superseded by considerations of context, emergent properties and the modular relations between the parts and the whole cell or organism system.

The SBP reframes the narrative from the workings of individual genes to those of the genome as a whole, emphasising two core concepts: networks and self-organising systems. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock (1984), discoverer of ‘jumping genes’, found they change places through ‘horizontal transmission’ thereby modulating the genome according to context, including environmental conditions. These interactions change mutation rates. This affects the structure of DNA according to the state of the cell – a higher organisational level than the genome – giving the kind of downward causation with possible feedback envisaged from an ‘emergence’ perspective. So at all levels are found non-linear networks rather than linear causality, DNA is not the global controller (‘master molecule’) but there is a distribution of agency over all the elements, otherwise self-organising systems. What does this signify for the project of this book? First, that reframing is a cognitive way out of a mistaken or otherwise sub-optimal path dependent trajectory. Second, that determinism and reductionism had deep roots in western thought before they began to wither. Third, SBP signifies a return towards the Aristotelian idea of emergent form undirected by a master molecule (‘silver bullet’) or global controller. Fourth, such simplifications may be necessary to the early development of fields of knowledge (‘low hanging fruit’). Fifth, every science is replete with metaphors (‘brain is like computer’ becoming ‘brain is computer’) which have communicative value but belong to the sphere of rhetoric.

The remainder of this introductory chapter devotes attention to: ‘Concepts of reframing’; ‘Evolutionary, complexity and related theory’; and ‘Systemic integration of policy modules’. The chapters that follow are grouped in four sections and the brief summaries of their key messages similarly. They relate respectively to: Part I, ‘Evolutionary transition space’ with chapters by Allen Scott, David Wolfe, Ron Martin and Peter Sunley, and Phil Cooke. Part II, ‘Innovation and diversity’ has chapters by Helen Lawton Smith, Elvira Uyarra and Kieron Flanagan, James Simmie, and Pierre-Alex Balland, Ron Boschma and Koen Frenken. Part III, on ‘Cluster emergence and destabilisation’ displays chapters by Helinä Melkas and Tuomo Uotila, Phil Cooke, Luciana Lazzeretti, and Dieter Rehfeld and Judith Terstriep. Part IV, dealing with ‘Evolutionary spatial policy’ has chapters by Franz Tödtling and Michaela Trippl, Kevin Morgan, and Fumi Kitagawa.

Concepts of reframing

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. … A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong

(Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993)

This quotation is a favourite with complexity theorists; both Eric Beinhocker (2006) and Melanie Mitchell (2009) use it as a prominent headline quotation in their volumes. Their books reveal a certain ecstasy at finding themselves on shining empty uplands waiting to be reframed or perhaps for the first time framed with new and better theoretical systems. Such are the hermeneutics of theoretical and empirical research, which is all framed, as Keynes realised, even for the most practical of persons, with the decaying theories of some long-dead economist (Keynes 1973). However, I thought it might be interesting to ask Tom Stoppard about his highly appropriate quotation. To which his website replied:

When asked once about the origins of Arcadia, Tom Stoppard replied that he had been reading Chaos, James Gleick’s (1987) book about mathematical theory and at the same time wondering about the contrasts between Romanticism and Classicism in style, temperament, and art. Few playwrights find source material in subjects as diverse, and unlikely, as Stoppard and his literary achievements are often considered more amazing for someone who left school at the age of seventeen and never attended a university. For some, Arcadia represents a pinnacle in Stoppard’s career. After years of writing clever, witty plays with intellectual appeal, he managed to produce one that tugs at the heart as well as the mind. After its Broadway debut, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, ‘There’s no doubt about it. Arcadia is Tom Stoppard’s richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio, and, new for him, emotion’.

Of course, we hope readers of this modest collection avoid the sense they have just read a ‘ravishing comedy’ or too many of the other dramatist’s achievements. But the story reminds us of the proximity between art and science pace Lord Snow (1959) whom my Leavisite English Literature teacher and Scrutiny contributor, Frank Chapman, used regularly to rail against for his presumption that literature might not be the jewel in the cultural crown. Snow is also experiencing something of a revival at the hands of complexity theorists – like Alicia Juarrero (Juarrero and Rubino 2008), coincidentally co-editor of a book called Reframing Complexity (Capra, Juarrero, Sotolongo and van Uden 2007) and Stuart Kauffman (2008), winner of the MacArthur ‘genius’ award in 1987 – for drawing attention to the split in western ontology between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and the sciences. Snow bemoaned the secondary cultural status enjoyed by science in his day. Kauffman (2008: 7) celebrates the fact, as he sees it, of the humanities’ relative contemporary impoverishment in the face of science’s achievements and reputation with elites since then. However, this book celebrates more the contribution of innovator and entrepreneur Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, for whom the core of his and his firm’s creativity lay in the company’s consistent practice of ‘recombining’ (in the pure Schumpeterian, 1934 sense) the humanities and technology, embedding design principles in the deepest recesses of the firm’s capability to de-stabilise prevailing product and services markets by its mantra to ‘think different’ and innovate better (Isaacson 2011). Accordingly, we agree with Alicia Juarrero’s (2000) judgement of the interpreter (scientist or artist) as an ‘attractor’ meaning an agent who can, by virtue of her interpretation influence system destabilisation and even phase-change (compare Jobs’ ‘reality distortion field’; Isaacson 2011). For this complexity variant of political ‘spin’ or in the world of financial innovation ‘stoking the shares,’ Juarrero calls in evidence Hans-Georg Gadamer:

In dynamical terms, the tradition in which interpreters are situated is itself an attractor. As social beings, interpreters are embedded in [system] dynamics. As Gadamer (1985: 216) notes, ‘The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the communality that binds us to the tradition’, that frames our interpretation

(Juarrero 2000: 54, emphasis added)

So, we conclude this opening foray (reader and interpreter) with that slightly nervous frisson of anticipation about finding out how to frame the object of interest to the volume, secure only in the knowledge that almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

This first-level entry to the reframing phenomenon is pitched universally, unwilling to privilege science or humanities and holding firmly that both tribes tell stories, some more convincing than others, but irredeemably framed nevertheless. Redemption comes in reframing that recognises, for example, the ‘the futility of utility’. The next step is to move to a level below, exploring the ways in which framing and reframing dialogues emerged in the fields of cognitive and social science where it is used in cultural analysis, media studies and political analysis to name a few. Possibly Erving Goffman (1974) wrote the seminal text, building on his earlier work problematising the presentation of self in everyday life. However, in Kauffman’s (2008) celebrated ‘tractor problem’ whereby, in 1916, chief engineer Eugene Farkas solved Henry Ford’s problem of engine block overload by dispensing with the chassis on his Fordson F, extending the rigid engine block base to replace it, accordingly also designing a more affordable product in the process, Kauffman refers to the difficulty of ‘framing’ innovation. There was no manual, directory or instructions, no ‘algorithm’, or prestatement, and no awareness by anyone of that potential engine block functionality. Frames dominate but by definition they also exclude; they are one source of the mysterious corporate myopia discussed in Cooke et al. (2010) and mentioned in Chapters 5 and 10, that often leads to extinction of, or at least, drastic change management in companies. Of course, this process, known as ‘exaptation’ in evolutionary biology (Vrba and Gould 1982) and ‘preadaptation’ in evolutionary complexity theory (Kauffman 2008) is a useful definition of what constitutes an innovation; it is not prescribed or predictable and therefore makes the lives of cognitive scientists trying to model human problem solving impossible. Accordingly, Farkas ‘reframed’ the dominant ‘frame’ and gave rise to the commissioning of a new set of manufacturing instructions for the tractor industry worldwide. For Kauffman therefore:

the frame is a list of the relevant features of the situation. No one knows what to do about the limitations on problem solving that result once the relevant features are prespecified. … Yet we do it all the time. At its heart, this is part of a radical conclusion: the mind is not (always) algorithmic.

(Kauffman 2008: 187)

In support of this rather engineer-channelled contention, Kauffman then proceeds to list ten known uses of a screwdriver, other than its design function – or ‘affordance’ as he calls it – of inserting a screw. Nevertheless, he concludes that the manner in which the mind, like a ghost ship, regularly slips its moorings freely to sail away wherever it will is key to our necessary understanding of creativity and innovation. Reframing is the act of creating a novel perspective on a misunderstood canvas, scene or system. We can understand how it occurred and how it prevailed but we cannot predict it.

A case of this kind of ‘creative framing’ occurs closer to home in the rather surprisingly linear perspective on ‘de-territorialisation’ adhered to by a melange of social and economic geographers commenting upon the potentially negative effects on local cultures of, first, industrialisation but more recently, globalisation. In a chapter on the ‘de-territorialisation’ of identity that geographers have seen as concomitant with globalisation (Roca 2010, an apparently strong linear causality is shared by Harvey, Massey, Lefebvre, Gidd...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Re-framing Regional Development
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: complex systems integration, ‘emergence’, and policy modularisation
• PART I Evolutionary transition space
• Part II Innovation and diversity
• Part III Cluster emergence and destabilisation
• Part IV Evolutionary spatial policy
• Index