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Organisational Restructuring, Knowledge and Spatial Scale: The Case of the US Department Store Industry
Author(s) -
Wood Steve
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.766
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1467-9663
pISSN - 0040-747X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9663.00180
Subject(s) - restructuring , embeddedness , tacit knowledge , space (punctuation) , scale (ratio) , economic geography , business , embedding , knowledge spillover , work (physics) , industrial organization , knowledge management , economics , sociology , computer science , geography , engineering , social science , mechanical engineering , cartography , finance , artificial intelligence , operating system
Recent economic geography literature has underlined the role of tacit/local knowledge in embedding firms within their locales, characterised by the work on ‘learning regions’, ‘territorial embeddedness’, ‘institutional thickness’ and ‘new industrial spaces’. This paper contributes to this theoretical debate, using evidence from organisational restructuring of the US department store industry to argue that, in contrast, retailers are using codified/universal knowledge, supported by tacit/local knowledge to successfully operate their retail operations across a range of spatial scales. As such, no one form of knowledge is exclusively relied upon but rather a blend of knowledges reduces costs and increases responsiveness across space.