Firms in territories: A relational perspective

The role of space and place in shaping the transformation of firms and indu stries and the impact of such transformations on the wider processes of ter ritorial development at local, regional, national, and global scales are ba sic research issues in economic geography. Such analyses tend to be compart mentalized, focusing on a specific economic activity or on a specific terri tory, rather than on the relationships between them. It is difficult simult aneously to conceptualize economic activities (including such phenomena as firms, industries, and other types of systems of networked economic activit y), on the one hand, and territorially defined economies, on the other. In this paper, we address the interconnections between economic activities and territories through an exploration of the mutually constitutive relationsh ips between firms and territories: the firm-territory nexus. The focus of o ur analysis is the nexus of three major dimensions-firms, industrial system s, and territories-embedded in turn in the overall macro dimension of gover nance systems.