State, Competition and Industrial Change in Ireland 1991-1999

As job losses increased rapidly in 2003 amid calls for increased competitiveness, it becomes all the more crucial to understand the character and causes of such industrial upgrading that did occur in Ireland in the 1990s. This paper argues that despite a continuing reliance on foreign investment, there were significant elements of local industrial upgrading within the Irish economy in the 1990s. Contrary to perspectives which emphasise the learning effects associated with foreign firms, the paper suggests that such upgrading only emerged when and where local and national institutions were established to support relations of innovation and organisational development. The current difficulties in the Irish economy can be traced in significant part to the failure to deepen and extend this emergent system of innovation. The emphasis on 'competitiveness' in contemporary policy debate threatens to undermine the public investment, social relations and collective institution building that have been, and will continue to be, central to industrial upgrading in Ireland

An Offshore Silicon Valley? The emerging Irish Software Industry

This paper assesses the development potential of local inter-firm networks in Newly Industrializing Countries. This is done through an analysis of the role of such networks in the growth of the software industry in the Republic of Ireland. Transnational software companies located in Ireland developed extensive local supply networks. Local social networks and a local culture of innovation contributed to the growth of an indigenous software development sector. While local networks can generate significant competitive advantage for a region they are inevitably internationalized as successful firms organize globally or as the region attracts further foreign investment. Corporations utilize local networks to solve problems of cost, control and innovation management in the globalization of production and corporate organization.While fostering local networks can be an effective public policy, it is not sufficient for development. The role of the state in supporting, guiding and bargaining with local firms in these networks remains a crucial aspect of development strategy

Time–space intensification: Karl Polanyi, the double movement, and global informational capitalism

This article advances the concept of 'time-space intensification' as an alternative to existing notions of time-space distanciation, compression and embedding that attempt to capture the restructuring of time and space in contemporary advanced capitalism. This concept suggests time and space are intensified in the contemporary period : the social experience of time and space becomes more explicit and more crucial to socioeconomic actors' lives, time and space are mobilized more explicitly in individual and corporate action, and the institutionalization of time and space becomes more politicized. Drawing on Polanyi's concepts of fictitious commodities and the double movement, and developing them through an analysis of work organization and economic development in the Irish software industry, the article argues that the concept of time-space intensification can add significantly to our understanding of key features of the restructuring of the temporal and spatial basis of economic development and work organization

The University and the Public Sphere after the Celtic Tiger

Many contemporary commentators have recognised that economies, cultures and political systems cannot be held together simply by individual pursuit of self-interest, combined with the rule of law. Something much deeper and richer is required and commentators have sought for this elusive quality through studies of âsocial capitalâ (Putnam, 2000), âtrustâ (Fukayama, 1995) and âcivil societyâ. Each of these themes draws our attention back to a vital element of contemporary democracy: the âpublic sphereâ - a shared, open space where dialogue, debate and deliberation can flourish. The classic images of the public sphere are the coffee houses of seventeenth century Europe or the vigorous debates among George Washington, James Madison and their colleagues in eighteenth century New England

The Crisis of Financialisation in Ireland

This paper explores the intersection of national and transnational processes in shaping Ireland's financial crisis. It uses insights from economic sociology to reconcile the anal}d;ical tension hetween an understanding of Ireland's crisis in terms of the unfolding of an international process and explanations that focus on specific national features. A series of significant policy decisions in the late 1990s favoured financial markets in allocating capital and opened up significant institutional space for speculative lending. Underneath the apparently consistent expansion of the property lending buhble since the mid-1990s, there was a significant shift in investment logics from the early 2000s as both residential and commercial real estate spending became detached from underlying demand. This shift in logic was based on two significant "translations" of investment rationalities into justifications of lending and investment that underpinned the bubble. Irish banks' own conceptions of risk and rational investments shifted subtly over time so that property lending was translated into a rational investment, encouraged by market dynamics such as increased bank profits, rising share prices and concentration of decision making power in the banking system. At the same time, and in the context of the establishment of the euro, investing in the assets of Irish banks was translated into a rational investment for international banks, in large part through the metrics of the credit ratings agencies. The paper concludes by revisiting the question of how we should understand the specifics of particular financial crises in conjunction with the general dynamics of financialisation - pointing to the importance of "translation" processes in creating social rationalities and the significance of "market liberalism" as a social formation in enabling these translations and promoting financialisatio

Dominance and Change in the Global Computer Industry: Military, Bureaucratic, and Network State Developmentalisms

This article examines the conditions under which firms in different economies were able to emerge as significant actors in the global computer industry during different time periods. To achieve this, the article divides into three periods the history of the industry in terms of the three major policy regimes that have supported the dominant firms and regions. It argues that these policy regimes can be thought of as state developmentalisms that take significantly different forms across the history of the industry. U.S. firmsâ dominance over their European counterparts in the 1950s and 1960s was underpinned by a system of âmilitary developmentalismâ where military agencies funded research, provided a market and developed infrastructure, but also demanded high quality products. The âAsian TigersââTaiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Koreaâin the 1970s and 1980s were able to eclipse their Latin American and Indian rivals due in large part to the significant advantages offered by a highly effective system of âbureaucratic developmentalism,â where bureaucratic elites in key state agencies and leading business groups negotiated supports for export performance. The 1990s saw the emergence of a system of ânetwork developmentalismâ where countries such as Ireland and Israel were able to emerge as new nodes in the computer industry by careful economic and political negotiation of relations to the United States, reestablished at the center of the industry, and by more decentralized forms of provision of state support for high-tech development. Finally, the conditions under which new regimes can emerge are a consequence of the unanticipated global consequences of previous regimes. While state developmentalisms have been shaped by existing global regimes, they have promoted further and different rounds of industry globalization

Falling over the Competitive Edge

In the Celtic Tiger years of the 1990s, Ireland apparently rode the roller coaster of freewheeling capitalism towards the information society. A boom in high technology industry was said to be fbelled by a new entrepreneurial class competing in free markets, and driven forward by private investors motivated by low tax rates. Ireland was unusual too in that it turned to international investors as the source of economic change. Foreign investment in high technology was intensely promoted, stressing Ireland's attractions: a skilled English-speaking labour force, access to the EU market and, above all, low corporate tax rates. The untrammelled market remained the road to a coveted place in the brave new information economy. This belief would have been all too familiar to Karl Polanyi, who wrote in the 1940s of the dangers of the 'liberal creed' that elevates markets above all other social relationships. While markets can be important and useful institutions, creating a 'market society' that prioritises markets over relationships of community and social solidarity will ultimately lead to social fragmentation and even economic decline. Sustainable economic growth must remain embedded in social relationships - as markets themselves tend to undermine the relationships of cooperation that are essential to social life and economic development. After World War 11, many advanced capitalist countries, in Polanyian fashion, embedded market relationships firmly within national welfare state institutions and international controls on trade and capital flows. Since the 1970s, however, these social and political institutions have been under attack from a new, virulent form of the 'liberal creed', which advocates widespread deregulation, privatisation and reduced public spending. A blind faith in the global market had come early to Ireland, with the turn to foreign investment and free trade in the 1950s. After the economic disasters of the 1980s, globalisation appeared kinder to Ireland in the 1990s with the Celtic Tiger boom. In 2002, however, the economy slowed, inflation rose, foreign investment rates declined and unemployment began to increase. Nonetheless, faith in the market society persisted. The widespread solution offered to these dilemmas was the restoration of cost competitiveness by reining in public spending and controlling wages. The barriers posed to market action by the public sector, social welfare and the demands of community and solidarity were to be stripped away

Global Ethnography

Globalization poses a challenge to existing social scientific methods of inquiry and units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social relations in particular communities and places. Ethnographic sites are globalized by means of various external connections across multiple spatial scales and porous and contested boundaries. Global ethnographers must begin their analysis by seeking out 'placemaking projects' that seek to define new kinds of places, with new definitions of social relations and their boundaries. Existing ethnographic studies of global processes tend to cluster under one of three slices of globalization 'global forces, connections, or imaginations' each defined by a different kind of place-making project. The extension of the site in time and space poses practical and conceptual problems for ethnographers, but also political ones. Nonetheless, by locating themselves firmly within the time and space of social actors 'living the global', ethnographers can reveal howglobal processes are collectively and politically constructed, demonstrating the variety of ways in which globalization is grounded in the local

Knowledge Economy

We examine a number of key questions regarding this knowledge economy. First, we look at the origin of the concept as well as early attempts to define and map the knowledge economy empirically. Second, we examine a variety of perspectives on the socio-spatial organisation of the knowledge economy and approaches which link techno-economic change and social-spatial organisation. Building on a critique of these perspectives, we then go on to develop a view of a knowledge economy that is contested along each stage of the process of the production, use, ownership and transformation of knowledge. We show that these struggles occur both globally and locally and are crucial forces shaping contemporary socio-spatial organisation. Finally, we briefly discuss the emergent patterns of socio-spatial inequality associated with this politically constructed knowledge economy