The broad concern of this paper is the development of modes of cooperation in competitive contexts. The concrete vehicle for examining this is local economic development policy in the United States, in particular the projects of inward investment that have been its primary expression. This foregrounds the character of social organization as necessarily spatial organization: organization in this case for mediating inward investment. The paper shows how the socio-spatial contexts of agents result in problems of social integration and how they influence the particular forms of cooperative structure adopted in order to solve those problems.
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