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