Research projects - Spaces of Economy & Society cluster

The list below may also include a small number of archived projects. In due course, these will be listed separately.

Geographical Foundations of Economic Performance

Associational Governance: Projects on business associations based on developing a long term historical view of how the geography of membership of associations has adapted over time and the key forces operating on these changes related to economic evolution. This develops the role of 'associational governance' as a means, between state and market, to involve businesses, non-profits, and public agents more effectively in policy exchanges to overcome information asymmetry to develop more effective policy supports. This research interlinks with the history of chambers of commerce.
Centre for Geographical Economic Research: The aim of the project is to determine how the regions and sub regions of the UK have differed in their response to and recovery from successive major economic recessions, and the extent to which these differences in response and recovery have affected long-run regional and sub-regional growth paths, and hence regional economic disparities.
Entrepreneurship Environments: This project is co-led with Dr John Round at the University of Birmingham is examining the geographical and entrepreneurial dynamics of Information Technology (IT) firms across eight European countries. Analysing policies which influence and affect entrepreneurial behaviour at both European and national levels, and the dynamics between the two, the project aims to identify the impact on entrepreneurship. Beyond the empirical project the research seeks to develop an ‘entrepreneurial idyll’ to benchmark different entrepreneurial environments against.
Evolutionary Economics and Economic Geography: Over the last few years, an embryonic 'evolutionary turn' has begun to emerge in economic geography. This research explores the scope of and limits to such an 'evolutionary economic geography'. Specifically, how and in what ways can recent developments in evolutionary economics itself be applied to economic-geographic studies, and indeed used to construct a new 'evolutionary economic geography' as a distinct body of theoretical and empirical research for understanding how economic landscapes, and individual regional and local economies, evolve over time.
HEI Entrepreneurial Architectures: Over the past twenty years universities have come to be regarded as engines of the knowledge-based economy. The focus of this research project is the changing institutional role of universities which has come to be framed as the ‘Third Mission’, and sees universities engaging with the economy and society. An extended study of university technology transfer offices in UK universities constitutes the basis of this work, with current research developing further institutional case studies.
History of Chambers of Commerce: This research by Professor Robert Bennett aims to give definitive historical analysis of chambers of commerce and other local business associations.
How regions react to recessions: resilience, recovery, and long-run impacts: The aim of the project is to determine how the regions and sub regions of the UK have differed in their response to and recovery from successive major economic recessions, and the extent to which these differences in response and recovery have affected long-run regional and sub-regional growth paths, and hence regional economic disparities.
Local and regional economic development in Britain: A series of ongoing projects on local and regional institutions. This includes assessing the UK Labour government's RDAs, LLSCs, Local government and Business Links; and since 2010 the UK Coalition government's abolition of RDAs, local government reforms, Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and Enterprise Zones. This has received major project grants from the Leverhulme Trust.
LocoMotive: This research aims at providing regional policy makers with a better understanding of the current R&D investment policies of large private sector companies in their regions compared with trends in other regions in Europe. The study examines R&D investment policies major companies and their relation to regional strategies, and identifies how future regional and European policies might better support R&D localisation in Europe.
Regional cultural economy, innovation and learning: This research seeks to demystify the cultural economy of dynamic regional industrial systems, based on the case study of the high tech industrial agglomeration in Salt Lake City, Utah.
SME external relations and external supports: This research has been focused on the role of government supports to SMEs, particularly Business Link. Future analysis will focus on examining gender and economic growth issues related to business advice and policy supports.
The Competitive Performance of Regions and Cities: Recent years have seen a surge of academic and policy attention devoted to the notion of 'competitiveness'. At the same time, there has been increasing focus on regions and cities as the key loci of wealth creation and economic governance. In short, the economic performance of regions and cities has moved centre stage in academic and policy discussions. The theoretical and empirical study of regional and urban economic performance is the subject of this research.
The Economic Geography of Money and Finance: This research programme has been concerned with exploring the spatialities of financial systems, and constructing a new economic geography of money. This has a key underlying aim: to demonstrate that the spatial structure of the financial system is far from neutral in its effects, but rather influences the allocation or funds, capital and credit across regions and localities.
The Geography of Public Finance and Government Decentralisation: Studies of how the spatial patterns of 'need' for public expenditure for people and businesses, relate to service costs and resources to supply them.

Landscapes of Work and Labour

Distributed work: This project explores multinational firms' attempts to foster communities of practice and encourage information flows within the firm.
The Geography of Workfare: Local Labour Markets and the New Deal: The move towards workfare policies represents a fundamental change in the welfare states and labour markets of many industrialised countries. Such a shift represents a process of activation in which the receipt of benefits and assistance by the unemployed are made conditional on the active fulfilment of job search and other work-focused obligations. This research discusses some of the implications of this finding for the idea of a new contract between unemployed individuals and the state. It outlines some of ways in which the local responsiveness of the policy could be improved, and some of the possible means of raising the demand for labour in depressed local areas.

Geographies of Social Welfare

Exploring the links between the geographies of crime and health: A summary of this project will be online shortly.
Geographical epidemiology: air quality and public health: This research investigates the importance of air pollution as a risk factor for strokes for coronary heart disease and stroke, by making extensive use of GIS technology and spatial data analysis.
Geographies of domestic violence: In England each year over 50,000 women and children are forced by violence to leave their homes and move to a refuge. This small-scale project contributes to research into the geographies of fear, looking in some depth at the spatial aspects of domestic violence in parts of southern and eastern England.
Methodologies for the analysis of spatial data: Since the late 1980s there has been a broadening of the field of spatial data analysis and a gathering together of many methodological threads within what has come to be called Geographic Information Science (GISc). This research brings together GISc and spatial statistics as a way of understanding the modern field of spatial data analysis.
The geography of crime and disorder: offences, offenders and victimization: A number of projects fall under this broad heading and currently involve collaboration with colleagues at Cambridge in Geography as well as the Institute of Criminology. The methodological orientation of all this work is quantitative (spatial analysis, spatial modelling and using GIS for data management and display) because research typically uses large police recorded crime datasets.