Getting Into Networks and Clusters: Evidence on the GNSS composite knowledge process in (and from) Midi-Pyrénées

This paper aims to contribute to the empirical identification of clusters by proposing methodological issues based on network analysis. We start with the detection of a composite knowledge process rather than a territorial one stricto sensu. Such a consideration allows us to avoid the overestimation of the role played by geographical proximity between agents, and grasp its ambivalence in knowledge relations. Networks and clusters correspond to the complex aggregation process of bi or n-lateral relations in which agents can play heterogeneous structural roles. Their empirical reconstitution requires thus to gather located relational data, whereas their structural properties analysis requires to compute a set of indexes developed in the field of the social network analysis. Our theoretical considerations are tested in the technological field of GNSS (Global Satellite Navigation Systems). We propose a sample of knowledge relations based on collaborative R&D projects and discuss how this sample is shaped and why we can assume its representativeness. The network we obtain allows us to show how the composite knowledge process gives rise to a structure with a peculiar combination of local and distant relations. Descriptive statistics and structural properties show the influence or the centrality of certain agents in the aggregate structure, and permit to discuss the complementarities between their heterogeneous knowledge profiles. Quantitative results are completed and confirmed by an interpretative discussion based on a run of semi-structured interviews. Concluding remarks provide theoretical feedbacks.Knowledge, Networks, Economic Geography, Cluster, GNSS

Appropriating the Returns from Industrial Research and Development

macroeconomics, industrial research and development, patent law

Wirtbarkeit : Cosmopolitan Right and Innkeeping

After defining Cosmopolitan Right as being limited to the conditions of “hospitality,” Kant includes “Wirtbarkeit” in brackets, a word which connotes innkeeping. Moreover, significant similarities obtain between the relevant passages of the Perpetual Peace and those of the Digest of Justinian on the obligations of ships’ masters, innkeepers, and stable keepers. Unlike ordinary householders, hospitality for innkeepers is a legal obligation, not a matter of philanthropy: they are deemed public officials with limited discretion to refuse travelers, and as fiduciaries of their guests strictly liable for losses to their property. Accordingly, this article attempts to explain Cosmopolitan Right at least in part by analogy to the private law of innkeeping. On this basis, it engages in the central philosophical debate about Cosmopolitan Right by accounting for Cosmopolitan Right solely from the “innate” right to freedom, rather than from “acquired” facts such as land or resource distributions or historical injustices

Why Do Some Places Succeed When Others Decline? A Social Interaction Model of Cluster Viability

One of the most convincing explanations papers generally provide concerning clusters in knowledge-based economies refers to the geographically bounded dimension of knowledge spillovers. Here we shall underline that location decision externalities precede local knowledge spillovers in the explanation of cluster aggregate efficiency, which thus requires us to focus on the sequential process of location and the nature of interdependences in location decision-making. To that end, we mean to associate cluster emergence with the formation of locational norms, and to study the critical parameters of their stability. These parameters relate to the type of decision externalities among more or less cognitively distant firms, which influences the weight and the resulting ambivalent role of knowledge spillovers at the aggregate level of clusters. We suggest two theoretical propositions which we test within a simple and general norm location dynamics modeling framework. We then proceed to discuss the results so obtained by comparing them with an emerging related literature based on the life cycle and viability of clustersclusters, location under decision externalities, cognitive distance, knowledge spillovers

Some observations regarding the demythification of the comparative advantage’s principle within Manoilescu generalized scheme

The validity in time of the comparative advantage’s principle, also of its application’s denial, can generate certain misunderstandings in the good exchange’s observation for an outsider (common sense), including the expert from other economics’ areas. The resolution for these cases can be made through checking requires’ discharging of the analytical economicity’s principle. In these conditions it can be noticed if the schemes, deducted in the analytical decomposition’s basis of the standard actions, can be used in the more precise and easier measurement than through empirical calculations in order to determine the comparative advantage’s size, of the gains from trade and the productivity effect. Manoilescu generalized scheme has, from this perspective the two main characteristics: its building has started from the empirical reality’s study of the exchange phenomena and the observation has been made only inside the economics’ borders. This way the scheme sustains the unitary explanations’ approaches of some different angles of understanding the comparative advantage on basis of some analytical efforts of other researchers. The suggested scheme separates the strictly economic analysis from the one inside the politic area (commercial politics), also of the productivity effect from more exact connections, decompounding the measurement in two steps. The identification through dialectical judgements, made as a continuation of the analytical ones, of the concordance between the built analytical reality and the empirical one, assures the check of the analytical economy’s principle. This step contributes to the permanent validity’s grounding of the comparative advantage’s principle in the exchange connections within the competitive economies. Meanwhile, the demythification of its full and permanent usage is also supported, in the way of its maximum potential’s capitalization in the manufactured and exchanged goods’ choice. The comparative advantage’s principle is nothing but an application of the minimum effort’s principle – the last one having a wider area of action – and will probably remain in the economies based on the social, competitive, monetary or natural relations.comparative advantage; Manoilescu generalized scheme; measurement; analytical economy principle; minimum effort; total factor productivity; epistemology

Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition

To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex communities of knowers as its subject matter, then its third party character is essentially stigmergic. In its most generic formulation, stigmergy is the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Extending this notion one might conceive of social stigmergy as the extra-cranial analog of an artificial neural network providing epistemic structure. This paper recommends a stigmergic framework for social epistemology to account for the supposed tension between individual action, wants and beliefs and the social corpora. We also propose that the so-called "extended mind" thesis offers the requisite stigmergic cognitive analog to stigmergic knowledge. Stigmergy as a theory of interaction within complex systems theory is illustrated through an example that runs on a particle swarm optimization algorithm

Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére’s article “Compression in Philosophy” seeks to pose François Laruelle’s engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler’s epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of “opacity,” the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical “data.” Laruelle’s generic immanence is posed against Stiegler’s process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler’s philosophy seeks to reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler’s Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the relation between Stiegler's artefaction and “compression” while, simultaneously, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler. I also further elaborate on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler’s work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Al-exander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova’s unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital