Recent years have been characterised by the increasing encroachment into policy and academic debates of discourses describing knowledge and weightless economies and an associated ‘war for talent’. In this paper we argue that these current discourses and their description of ‘talent’ and...

International business travel has always been an important labour process in the accumulation of capital for the firm. It is surprising, therefore, that relatively little time has been devoted to the study of business travel, both as a facet of contemporary mobility and as an economic practice....

In common with geographical inquiry more generally, questions of power have long been fundamental to research in economic geography. For instance, investigations into the fundamentally uneven nature of economic development point to the enduring power asymmetries between different places and...

The emergence of global architecture firms and their role in the production of city architectures raises a number of questions for social scientists. For example, how - indeed do - global architects ensure the buildings they design are ‘in place’ and appropriate for the urban cultural,...

Understanding the internationalization of professional services like advertising, architecture, accounting, consulting and legal services continues to attract considerable attention in academic and policy circles. Research in geography and management studies has emphasised the different...

The geographical strategies of transnational corporations have received extensive attention from economic geographers. A particularly important line of study has focused upon the diverse national institutions that create geographically heterogeneous cultures of work. Yet, none of these studies...

The 'knowledge economy' is now widely debated and economic geographers have made a significant contribution to understanding of the influences upon the production and dissemination of tacit knowledge within and between firms. However, the continued association of tacit knowledge with practices...

This paper develops existing work on building design through a focus on one important yet understudied form of regulation: market standards. Market standards are agreed upon definitions of ‘necessary' provision in buildings and are fundamental in ‘formatting' markets and determining the...

Financial and business services (FABS) as intermediaries play a significant role in global production networks (GPNs). Yet the mechanisms through which they influence the activities of lead and supplier firms in GPNs have received little in-depth attention. The paper addresses this shortcoming...

Karl Polanyi is arguably one of the most significant economic sociologists. At first glance the links between Polanyi's ideas about markets, society and institutions and strategy may not be obvious. However, there is a hereto unrecognised link between recent writing about institutions and...