In recent years, economic geographers have made increasing use of a wider social science literature that has been concerned with the concept of the ‘community of practice’, and how that relates to an increasingly globalised knowledge economy. However, this engagement with the CoP literature has been a diverse one, spanning firm-based studies to work on project ecologies and global production networks. In various ways, economic geography has thus begun to use the concept of community to rethink the way the spatiality of economic practice is understood and explained in studies of firms and economic systems. Yet this paper argues that economic geographical thinking has to date not directly engaged with the spatial form and configuration of practice communities. Consequently, its contention is that the concept is largely under-theorised within economic geographical thinking and that economic geographers have, in particular, insufficiently conceptualized the interrelationships between practice communities and firms, production networks and other economic actors. The paper therefore seeks to propose an epistemological framework for better conceptualizing the spatiality of practice communities that seeks to both distinguish between different spaces that practice communities occupy, and to create the scope to theorise how difference in the spatial form of practice communities shape economic outcomes at the level of firms, regions and economies.
Andrew is an economic geographer with interests in social and cultural aspects of economic activity. His research interests globalisation (in relation to firms and work practices), financial and business service industries, voluntary work and international development, migration and mobility, critical social theory and the relation between politics, the academy, and policy development. His publications include Management Consultancy and Banking in an Era of Globalisation (2003), Dictionary of Globalization (2006), Globalization: Key Thinkers (2010) and Human Geography: The Basics (2012)
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