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Abstract

In the wake of a relational turn, economic geographers have begun to scrutinize the relationships and interactions between people and organizations as a driving force behind economic processes at both global and local scales. Through a focus on contingent contextuality and path dependence, relational economic geography and network thinking have provided the necessary conceptual toolbox for untangling the structural effects and drivers of these relationships and their spatial embeddedness. However, despite the conceptual richness of the relational approach, empirical studies have often fallen short of capturing its core tenets: First, there is a prevalence to focus on places, infrastructures, and similarities as aggregate proxies for actors and their socio-economic relationships as the unit of geographical network analysis; While often convenient, this approach misses out on the capacity of networks to represent spatially embedded social contexts as enablers or constraints of economic action. Second, while path dependence is at the heart of evolutionary approaches towards economic geography, few studies actually trace how path-dependent and interrelated innovation shapes the long-term emergence of fields. Relational processes are especially salient when outcomes are opaque, decisions are interdependent, and when formal rules and roles are weak or absent. In this thesis, I ask how actors navigate such contexts and investigate the structural conditions and consequences of their navigation efforts. In my pursuit of this question, I draw on literatures from sociology, economics, and organization studies and build on novel methods of network analysis capable of empirically capturing contextuality and path dependence to investigate relational processes at three levels of economic activity: The thesis first looks towards a localized and informal trade platform to demonstrate how consumers rely on their former transactions to navigate exchange uncertainty and how such an exchange system can become liable to personal lock-in. It then moves on to show how the geographically and organizationally diversified search for innovation opportunities structures the transfer of knowledge across a globalized and partially informal corporate scouting community. Finally, the thesis shows how the linkage of distinct knowledge domains drives the long-term emergence of heterogeneous technological fields. In its endeavor to trace these processes, the thesis contributes a set of distinct relational research designs that demonstrate how advances in methods and data can be employed to empirically exploit the conceptual richness of relational economic geography.