Industry Building as Contested Market Building: Knowledge, Politics, and the Rise of Beijing in China's Virtual Economy

Combining insights from the theory of fields to markets and recent geographic literature on regional innovation, I conceptualize regional industry building as a contested process of market building involving initiatives of both economic actors and political actors in intertwined governmental fields and organizational fields. Market building entails the contribution of knowledge brokers capable of bridging the gap between the local industrial community and global leaders. Moreover, it requires the institutionalization of a stable governance structure to enable the rise of productivity-enhancing new entrepreneurship, especially to minimize ‘unproductive’ endeavors of technological entrepreneurs in fighting against powerful incumbents and reactionary institutions. From a policy perspective, regional industry building entails not only policies facilitating the pooling of glocal knowledge brokers at the regional scale, but also institutional reform and political transformation in the national arena, especially in an emerging market economy.