Place and industrial development: paths to understanding?

Despite profound spatial shifts, place continues to matter for industrial development. The development and evolution of firms and places are deeply entangled, so that location continues to shape the capabilities and resources available to industries, sometimes positively, in other cases negatively. The significance of place in industrial development involves the locally-varying and locally-specific interaction of complex, emergent processes. Recent years have seen the growth of an evolutionary path-based approach to these processes, and this chapter provides a critical review of the 'path approach'. It argues that a path focus has undoubtedly contributed to meso-level investigations of industrial changes, but nevertheless requires a firmer empirical and operational base to build on the many efforts at categories and classification. Many studies have identified different categories of paths and types of action, but there has been less progress in understanding processes and mechanisms of change and their interaction with wider economic contexts.