London's and New York's Advertising and Law Clusters and their Networks of Learning: Relational Analyses with a Politics of Scale?

Abstract

A preoccupation in cluster literatures has been with theorising the way learning occurs and knowledge is produced. Studies have highlighted the complementary local and global learning networks involved. This paper engages with this debate through empirical examination of the networks of learning that exist within and between the clusters of advertising and law firms in London and New York. Based on data gained from interviews, the paper shows that existing literatures excessively devalue and differentiate local versus global learning networks, ignoring the ways the organisation and nature of learning and knowledge production at local and global scales can be similar and equally valuable. It therefore suggests using relational conceptualisations to understand and describe translocal relational learning networks. It also shows, however, that a politics of scale influences the behaviours of actors in these networks, suggesting that recent calls to jettison scale completely from geographers' analytical toolkits might be too hasty.