Material culture: Embedded firms, organizational networks and the local economic development of a fashion quarter

This paper explores the economic and cultural geographies of one localized agglomeration, in order to understand how territorially defined networks of firms can offer the basis for enhanced competitiveness. The focus is on the evolution and dynamics of the fashion quarter in the Nottingham Lace Market, which assumes the geographic form of a dense clustering of fashion-related firms which are linked together through complex organizational networks. Drawing on notions of the embedded firm the paper explores the synergies that result from such foci of economic activity and which confer significant competitive advantages in addition to being powerful instruments of job creation and growth. In this way the aim is to understand how organizations interrelate with one another through a particular institutional milieu and how this, in turn, creates the pre-conditions for a dynamic trajectory of economic development. Finally, the paper questions the role which local institutions and public policy play in shaping and sustaining agglomerations for economic activity.