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Despite increasing calls on the state to manage major challenges, in the existing literature, the state – and public sector activities more generally – tends to be overlooked as an agent of regional change. The role of public sector jobs is often taken for granted, with diverse empirical findings being strongly influenced by geography and time period, if they are considered at all. We discuss two main threads of research on contemporary public sector employment that could enhance our understanding of the role of the public sector in regional development (i.e. human capital formation and diversification). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Social reproduction understood as daily habits and social relations supports economic production and increases individual resilience. • In left behind areas, policymakers should view socio-spatial networks as a source of resilience for individual adaptation strategies. • A central advocacy unit in the capital city provides distant actors with political, financial, and social leverage reducing their peripheral perception. • In resilience studies, a relational approach to regions reveals that network detachment amplifies peripheralization for actors in declining activities in geographically distant areas. Resilience has gathered significant attention from economic geographers, yet their focus has primarily centered on economic outcomes at the regional level. This approach often overlooks the intricate micro-processes and lived experiences during crises, assuming that individual resilience can be understood solely through macro-level economic observations. We argue that comprehending the questions of resilience 'to what means' and 'to what ends' requires that we acknowledge the importance of social reproduction and daily practices. Through semi-structured interviews with mink farmers in Denmark and by using the concepts of spaces of dependence and spaces of engagement, we first highlight the everyday practices and broader social structures that individuals aim to preserve and reproduce. Second, we draw attention to the application of a relational spatial ontology in resilience studies by discussing cross-scalar networks of individuals as an adaptation strategy. In so doing, we contribute to the resilience literature in economic geography by highlighting that resilience for individuals entails the reproduction of everyday practices. We also draw attention to the consequences of network detachment for individual livelihoods. Thus unveiling how peripherality is shaped and re/produced, rather than given, through the evolving networks of 'left behind' people in 'left behind' places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article provides an initial systematic analysis of how social networks influence productivity in regional agglomerations. This is accomplished by means of matched employer-employee data for the entire Swedish economy for the period 1990-2008, allowing us to construct a weighted co-worker network with aggregated tie weights on the plant level. We find evidence that increasing density of the plant-level network has a positive effect on productivity, particularly in large regional industry-clusters with high degrees of specialization. Triadic closure of ties is, however, negatively linked to productivity, suggesting the importance of nonredundant knowledge. Moreover, we find only limited support for the notion that the diversity of linkages within or across regions as such is beneficial for productivity. Instead, we show that the degree of specialization conditions the extent to which both linkages to related industries in the region and nonlocal ties are beneficial. Our results thus suggest that having dense social networks is a crucial feature of high-performing agglomerations, and that interindustry, as well as interregional, linkages are compensatory in cases when sufficient industry specialization is absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mobility of workers is an important source of regional dynamics, but the effect of mobility on regional productivity growth is not straightforward, as some firms tend to win while others lose from mobility. In the present paper, we argue that the co-worker networks across plants that are established by labour moves are important for both local learning opportunities and job matching quality and should hence facilitate regional growth. We therefore propose a new homophily-biased perspective on coworker network creation and show that it suits geographical analyses better than random networks do. Moreover, panel vector autoregression models provide systematic evidence that an increase in co-worker network density is positively related to regional productivity growth. This is found to be important even when only ties across plants that are not directly linked by labour mobility are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the industry employment histories of all individuals who at some point have been affiliated with the declining German or the dismantling Swedish shipbuilding industry during 1970–2000. We analyse the situation of the individual workers leaving shipbuilding, investigating the extent to which they were employed at all, tended to move to related sectors within or outside the region, and whether such moves were beneficial for the individuals. Combining insights from labour geography and redundancy studies with evolutionary economic geography, we find remarkably similar results for the West German and Swedish cases. Our findings indicate a notable impact of the regional industry structure on the labour market outcomes for workers leaving shipbuilding. This suggests that more attention should be devoted to the specific structures of the absorptive capacity of regional labour markets. The findings are discussed within the context of a mature industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the impact on regional renewal and employment ascribed to rapidly growing firms (High impact firms, HIFs) this article argues that little is still known in economic geography and business studies today regarding the mechanisms influencing growth of such firms and, hence, the potential impact on regional employment. The aim of this article is thus to explore how the qualitative content of skills (i.e. the degree of similarity, relatedness and un-relatedness) recruited to a firm during a period of fast growth, which influences its future success. Our findings, based on a sample of 1589 HIFs in the Swedish economy, suggest that it is not only the number of people employed that matters to aid understanding of the future destiny of the firms--but also, more importantly, it is the scope of the skills recruited and their proximity to related industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]