Harald Bathelt

I hold the Canada Research Chair in ‘Innovation and Governance’ at the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Canada. I am also Professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography and Planning. My research and teaching interests are in the areas of industrial and economic geography, political economy and methodology. Specific areas which provide the focus of my research and teaching activities include the analysis of long-term social and economic development, industrial clustering and the socio-economic impacts of regional and industrial change.

A relational approach of economic geography, which emphasizes economic and social processes in spatial perspective (using a ‘geographical lens’), provides the analytical framework for my research. This rests on three basic propositions. First, economic actors are situated in contexts of social and institutional relations. Second, economic processes are path-dependent to the extent that future action is dependent on past decisions. Third, economic processes are at the same time contingent in that agents make choices which may deviate from existing development paths.

The relational approach has distinct consequences for the way in which economic, social and political processes are analyzed. In particular, it calls for a micro perspective to understand economic structures and processes, focussing on those individual and collective agents involved in the governance of economic action. There are three levels of governance which I consider in my work, i.e. (i) the governance of economic organization and innovation at the level of the individual firm or organization, (ii) the governance of inter-organizational interaction in projects, networks and clusters, and (iii) the territorial governance of industrial systems and “global” value chains in local, regional, national and international contexts.