Abstract
Rural regions and small businesses are often assumed to be marginalised in relation to globalisation, which is perceived to be an urban phenomenon. However, emerging rural business network configurations contradict this commonly held view. This chapter presents an investigation of spatial and ‘relational’ structures in business networks of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in rural areas of five European countries. It argues that successful and dynamic firms derive ‘networking economies’ from frequent and effective interaction, both within the local business environment and with a more extensive set of linkages stretching out across Europe. New communication technologies allow entrepreneurs to communicate with contacts and institutional sources without the geographic limitations that would have hampered them just a decade ago. Actors such as local and county authorities, professional associations and European-funded business advisors increasingly act as ‘network brokers’ for local SMEs. In this way, ‘organised proximity’ is increasingly independent of geographic space, providing rural business with an alternative to agglomeration as a competition strategy.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This research was carried out as part of European Framework 7 project DERREG (Developing Europe’s Rural Regions in the Era of Globalisation) http://www.derreg.eu. The authors would like to acknowledge the important contributions made by the following partners: Emilija Kairyte (NeVork, Slovenia) Milada Stastna (Mendelova Universita v Brnĕ, Czech Republic) Irma Potočnik Slavič (Universza v Ljubljana, Slovenia) Wiebke Wellbrock (Wageningen Universiteit, Netherlands).
- 2.
Incidentally, this partly contradicts Storper’s conception of untraded interdependencies as constituting ‘region-specific assets in production’ (Storper, 1997).
- 3.
Especially UCINET 6 Software (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002). A UCINET tutorial by Bob Hanneman and Mark Riddle is available at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~hanneman/nettext/
- 4.
‘Partly internationalised’ means that either sales or purchases were internationalised, ‘fully internationalised’ means that both sales and purchases were involved.
References
Amin, A. (1998). Globalisation and regional development: A relational perspective. Competition and Change, 3, 145–165.
Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (1994). Living in the global. In A. Amin & N. Thrift (Eds.), Globalization, institutions, and regional development in Europe (pp. 1–22). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bathelt, H., Malmberg, A., & Maskell, P. (2004). Clusters and knowledge: Local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation. Progress in Human Geography, 28(1), 31–56.
Borgatti, S. P., Everett, M. G., & Freeman, L. C. (2002). Ucinet for windows: Software for social network analysis. Harvard, MA: Analytic Technologies.
Boschma, R. A. (2005). Proximity and innovation: A critical assessment. Regional Studies, 39(1), 61–74.
Chetty, S., & Blankenburg Holm, D. (2000). Internationalisation of small to medium-sized manufacturing firms: A network approach. International business Review, 9, 77–93.
Cooke, P. N., & Morgan, K. (1993). The network paradigm: New departures in corporate and regional development. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 11, 543–564.
Copus, A., Hall, C., Barnes, A., Dalton, G., Cook, P., Weingarten, P., et al. (2006). Study on employment in rural areas (SERA). Report for the European Commission, DG AGRI, Brussels. Retrieved April 22, 2011, from http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/publi/reports/ruralemployment/sera_report.pdf
Dicken, P. (2007). Global shift: Mapping the changing contours of the world economy (5th ed.). London: Sage.
Fujita, M., Krugman, P., & Venables, A. (1999). The spatial economy. Cities, regions and international trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Garretsen, H., & Martin, R. (2010). Rethinking (new) economic geography models: Taking geography and history more seriously. Spatial Economic Analysis, 5(2), 127–160.
Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. The American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3), 481–510.
Herdzina, K., Findeis, A., Fleischmann, S., Wander, C., Piasecki, B., & Rogut, A. (2004). European rural SMEs in the context of globalization and enlargement. In L. Labrianidis (Ed.), The future of Europe’s rural peripheries (pp. 86–113). England: Ashgate.
Holmlund, M., Kock, S., & Vanyushyn, V. (2007). Small and medium-sized enterprises’ internationalisation and the influence of importing on exporting. International Small Business Journal, 25, 459–477.
Johanson, J., & Mattsson, L. G. (1988). Internationalization in industrial systems – A network approach. In N. Hood & J. E Vahlne (Eds.), Strategies in global competition (pp. 303–321). New York: Croom Helm.
Johansson, B., & Quigley, J. M. (2004). Agglomeration and networks in spatial economics papers. Regional Science, 83, 165–176.
Kaufmann, A., & Tödtling, F. (2000). Systems of innovation in traditional industrial regions: The case of Styria in a comparative perspective. Regional Studies, 34(1), 29–40.
Kingsley, G., & Malecki, E. J. (2004). Networking for competitiveness. Small Business Economics, 23, 71–84.
Krugman, P. (1991). Geography and trade. Leuven: Leuven University Press; Cambridge: MIT Press.
Krugman, P. (1994). The rise and fall of development economics. In L. Rodwin & D. Schoen (Eds.), Rethinking the development experience (pp. 39–58). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lechner, C., & Dowling, M. (2003). Firm networks: External relationships as sources for the growth and competitiveness of entrepreneurial firms. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 15, 1–26.
Marshall, A. (1920). Principles of economics. London: Wiley.
Nederveen, P. (1994). Globalisation as hybridization. International Sociology, 9(2), 161–184.
Nummela, N., Loane, S., & Bell, J. (2006). Change in SME internationalisation – An Irish perspective. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 13(4), 562–583.
OECD. (1997). Globalisation and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Paris: OECD.
Oerlemans, L. A. G., & Meeus, M. T. H. (2005). Do organizational and spatial proximity impact on firm performance? Regional Studies, 39(1), 89–104.
Rallet, A. (2002). L’économie de proximités – Propos d’étape. Etudes Recherche Systeme Agraires Développement, 33, 11–25.
Storper, M. (1995). The resurgence of regional economies, ten years later: The region as a nexus of untraded interdependencies. European Urban and Regional Studies, 3, 191–221.
Storper, M. (1997). The regional world: Territorial development in a global economy. New York: Guilford Press.
Tödtling, F., & Kaufmann, A. (1999). Innovation systems in regions of Europe – A comparative perspective. European Planning Studies, 7(6), 699–717.
Torre, A., & Gilly, J. P. (2000). On the analytical dimension of proximity dynamics. Regional Studies, 34(2), 169–180.
Torre, A., & Rallet, A. (2005). Proximity and localization. Regional Studies, 39(1), 47–59.
Veltz, P. (1996). Mondialisation Villes et Territoires. L’économie d’archipel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Wasserman, S., & Faust, K. (1994). Social network analysis. Methods and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, A. (1929). Theory of the location of industries. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Winch, G. W., & Bianchi, C. (2006). Drivers and dynamic processes for SMEs going global. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 13(1), 73–88.
Yeung, H. W. (2000). Reconceptualising the ‘firm’ in new economic geographies: An organisational perspective. Paper presented at the workshop on “The Firm” in Economic Geography, March 9–11, 2000, University of Portsmouth, UK.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dubois, A., Copus, A., Hedström, M. (2012). Local Embeddedness and Global Links in Rural Areas: Euclidean and Relational Space in Business Networks. In: Hedberg, C., do Carmo, R. (eds) Translocal Ruralism. GeoJournal Library, vol 103. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2315-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2315-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-2314-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-2315-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)