community within the market

Taking hold of the essence of an innovation culture is amazingly easy. Just fill in the blank. When an idea is proposed, you will discover the core values of an innovation culture in the words that follow this phrase: “We can NOT do that because…” the administrators won’t like it, the attorneys won’t allow us, it’s not in the budget its too expensive, marketing will take it from us if it actually succeeds, the vendor will charge too much for changing the code, IT shouldn’t be directing this kind of initiative, it distracts us from our mission and so on. Whatever reasons, evasions or excuses Tech-fluentials use to explain away why good ideas can’t be implemented is the organization’s innovation culture responsibility, period end of sentence; successful innovation is separate from successful implementation. Innovation initiatives must have flowcharts and methods giving details how internal resistance will be identified then dealt with. Overcoming resistance is the key to dynamically drive implementation of innovations within any endeavor.

A new type of business entity is emerging: the controlled, hierarchical production or distribution system with features of chaotic self-organization. Self-organizing systems have forever produced integrated outcomes in human societies (language) and in nature (ecosystems). Perhaps the earliest examples of self-organizing commercial systems are town markets that, with their haggling merchants, date back to the dawn of commerce itself. But in the Internet age, self-organizing systems go beyond market exchange to produce complex, sophisticated, highly competitive products: computer operating systems (Linux) scientific blueprints (the human genome) and multimedia social entertainments (online games and music). Mother Nature and the experiences of successful firms—teach us that self-organization can be robust and competitive.

Concentration is associated with the process of convergence which is generally understood to include technological integration of systems to produce, process, distribute and display all forms of communication including audio, visual and data. The ability to process and move massive amounts of content at the speed of light using a common digital language enables companies to take advantage of global economies of scale, a global division of labor and the ability to reprocess the same content for many different formats within the same media conglomerate (Sussman, 1997). In addition to this widely recognized form of convergence, there is another factor that is growing in importance but which has received little attention outside of specialized fields of technology such as economic geography. This is spatial convergence or the coming together of related businesses that form networks of firms in the same physical place. One of the reasons for the lack of attention: it is a widely held view that communication and information technology eliminate the importance of place by making it possible to carry out complex activities over vast distances.

This is not a recent view. Karl Marx (1973, p.539) remarked on the power of capitalism to “annihilate space with time” over a century ago. Today, there is considerable attention paid to the “death of distance” (Cairncross, 1997) and “the end of geography” (O’Brien, 1992). These conclusions are understandable and contain important insights on the global expansion of business. But in their overstatement, they miss the importance of face-to-face contact and the ability to draw on rich local resources that dense physical networks provide. This is leading scholars to pay more attention to the ways in which spatial convergence is transforming if not annihilating space (Castells, 1996). As a result, notwithstanding the importance of national and global effects, a growing number of political economists across a wide range of substantive areas have recently concentrated on local centers of power and on the local consequences of global power (Eade, 1997; King, 1996; Sassen, 1991; Sussman and Lent, 1998).

Those operating in a cultural studies tradition have already taken a perspective of the local with studies of reception and resistance of specific places. Admirable in its goal of paying attention to what happens when globalization “hits the ground,” as numerous commentators have noted, work suffers because it severs reception from production and distribution, defines resistance in the widest possible terms and sentimentalizes local culture (Harvey, 1996). It is time for communication scholarship that is rooted in political economy to return to the local and not to celebrate it but to rebalance our sense of geographical scale which the geographer Neil Smith (1992: 72-73) correctly concludes is central to a renewed materialist conception of social life: In effect, there is no social theory of geographical scale, not to mention an historical materialist one. And yet it plays a crucial part in our whole geographical construction of material life. Was the brutal repression of Tiananmen Square a local event, a regional, national event or was it an international event? We might reasonably assume that it was all four, which immediately reinforces the conclusion that social life operates in and constructs some sort of nested hierarchical space rather than a mosaic. How do we critically conceive the requirements for the various balances, how do we arbitrate and translate between them? How do we put back into working order thousands of years of human conditioning that is seemly gone awry?

One way of looking at this is to reflect on Raymond Williams notion of “militant particularism” by which he meant that solidarities developed in specific local struggles gave rise to general ideas about benefiting humanity (Harvey, 1996: 19-45). For Williams (1989) global ideals such as the democratization of social, political and economic life and the creation of vibrant public spaces were produced in the confusion of genuine conflicts in communities, factories, offices and homes. The remainder of this paper addresses a contemporary version of militant particularism, what some might see as a distorted or even perverse variation on Williams’ theme, namely, the creation of local and regional high technology zones that transform spatial, social and cultural relations in a region to the detriment of democratic ideals and the public sphere.