Geographies of production III

Abstract

Within economic geography there has been a growing body of work that straddles the disciplinary boundaries of management studies and international business (IB) scholarship. Whilst this growing cross-disciplinary proximity may be related to increasing numbers of economic geographers being located in business and management schools, this report argues that it also corresponds to a growing fruitful and productive cross-disciplinary interest from both management studies and international business. It contends that there is growing epistemological and theoretical common ground between both these disciplines and economic geography which reflects a shift towards spatial thinking being increasingly evident in the empirical and conceptual concerns of management and IB scholars. The report reviews two major elements to this intersection within the recent economic geographical literature – what might loosely be termed the ‘new management geography’ and a broad range of work that brings together the thinking of economic geographers and IB scholarship concerned within firm internationalization.