Gendered Geographies of High-Tech Regional Economies

Over the last two decades, as part of a ‘cultural turn’, an expansive research agenda has developed in economic geography around the sociocultural dynamics of regional learning and innovation processes underpinning high-tech regional development. At same time within the subdiscipline, there has also emerged a substantial research agenda around cultural economies of gender. For the most part, these two research streams have proceeded separately from one another. Recently, however, a number of scholars have begun to challenge this intellectual divide. In parallel with similarly motivated research literatures in organizational psychology, management studies and human relations, scholars have explored how different dimensions of high-tech regional economic development are fundamentally and unavoidably gendered. This article offers a summary introduction to this nascent research agenda, focused on three phenomena widely documented in the regional literature as supporting intra- and interfirm learning and innovation processes, but whose attendant gendered social relations and gender divisions have yet to be fully analysed and understood, namely, (i) processes of worker mobility, labour ‘churning ’ and their brokering by different labour market intermediaries; (ii) venture capital financing, entrepreneurship and firm start-up; and (iii) the origins and implications of (masculinist) corporate cultures for firms ’ absorptive capacities. By way of conclusion, the article outlines some interesting directions in which future research in this area might usefully develop in order to contribute to a broader project around holistic regional (socio)economic development.