Innovation and the spatial dimensions of information capture

Recent theories from the field of industrial geography contend that region-specific, 'untraded interdependencies', including networking, conventions and rules within the business community, are important assets in enabling small, innovative firms to learn about technological and organisational development. The 'learning region' has since been adopted as a slogan for economic development and renewal, despite limited empirical analysis on the spatial dimensions of actual learning processes. The purpose of this study is to analyse how innovative firms combine sources of information in a spatial setting. Analysis from the empirical findings reveals that small, innovative firms in the case study example of the instrumentation and control sector located in the outer area of the London Metropolitan Region (LMR), predominantly rely on a few key sources of information, recombined with knowledge of information from past employment. These key sources are usually linkages with other firms, particularly customers, that transcend regional and national boundaries. The spatial dimensions of information acquisition depend on the type of information. Sources that are more important at the regional level are relatively more important to more generalised aspects of information acquisition. Underpinning these observations is the significance of the relationship between the spatial dimensions of information flows and the nature of the firms' innovation characteristics. The specific information required for technological development is spatially dispersed from the firms' home region, whereas more generalised types of information diffuse more easily from region to region. The location behaviour of the firms is nevertheless explained by the need to co-ordinate information flows. This is because transport links are important in enabling the firms to access specific information beyond the region. The availability of various sources of more generalised information in the London Metropolitan Region is still regarded as a vital support mechanism for small-scale innovation in the IC sector. The policy implications of this analysis are addressed

Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief – in contexts where it becomes an identity marker – is bound up with relational practices of belief, such that distinctions between “belief in” and “belief that” are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals

Theorising the value of collage in exploring educational leadership

This article contributes to theorising the value of collage as a methodological approach. It begins with a discussion of the methodological difficulties of exploring hidden meanings and individual experience through the research process. The illuminative potential of arts-based methodologies in qualitative research is then investigated. The article makes the case for the specific advantages of using collage to explore the experience of leadership, through a discussion of two collage-based studies. It proposes a variant of the ‘think aloud’ process, used in conjunction with collage, as a route to producing deep understandings of the multiple ways in which leadership is experienced and understood as a social process. The argument is made that collage enables the accessing and sharing of profound levels of experience not accessible through words alone, and considers the impact of the physicality of collage on its potential to release these profound insights. A five-stage process for the analysis of collage is then set out. The article concludes by offering a theory of the value of collage as a methodological approach to exploring experiences of leadership, through use of the concepts of physicality, wholeness and participant agency.Peer reviewe

Political Theory, Political Science, And The End Of Civic Engagement

Within a span of fifteen years civic engagement has become a cottage industry in political science and political theory, but the term has now outlived its usefulness and exemplifies Giovanni Sartori\u27s worry about conceptual stretching. This article traces civic engagement\u27s ascension as a catch-all term for almost anything that citizens might happen to do together or alone, and illustrates the confusion that its popularity has occasioned. It proposes that civic engagement meet a well-deserved end, to be replaced with a more nuanced and descriptive set of engagements: political, social, and moral. It also examines the appeal of engagement itself, a term that entails both attention and energy. Attention and energy are the mainsprings of politics and most other challenging human endeavors. But they can be invested politically, or in associative pursuits, or in moral reasoning and follow-through, and those types of engagement can, but need not, coincide. We should be asking which kinds of engagement-which kinds of attention and energetic activity-make democracy work, and how they might be measured and promoted