E-Clusters in the E-Society: the Case of the Digital Content Industry, 2005

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.This is a qualitative data collection. This project was concerned with the organisation and physical location of work in cutting edge e-businesses today; with the assumption that this is an appropriate 'forward position' from which to draw conclusions as to the likely state of the rest of the economy in a future, more fully developed, e-society. The research question was 'an examination of the forms of co-location and socio-economic interaction within and between firms in digital content industries'. The team had constructed a survey of seven clusters across 3 industries in the digital content sector. We interviewed principals of 180 firms. It succeeded in carrying out seven case studies as planned: one in Los Angeles (Venice Beach), one in London, both on the film special effects industry; three on the games industry (Scotland, North West and Yorkshire); two on digital design (Brighton and London). Location factors turned out to not be as straight forward as cost, but related more to industry institutions (ownership and contacting relations, and market structure), and to labour market pooling (to facilitate re-employment of freelancers), and to local knowledge networks of workers outside/across of the firms. Forms of social networking proved to be critical. However, whilst the project had expected this the research found that social networking was itself embedded in new forms of project and freelance, or precarious, working. Thus, there was a strong internal dynamic between labour processes, information and knowledge networks, and, finally the linkage to specific places. A striking finding of the research, which confirmed our hypothesis and whole thrust of the project design, was that there were significant differences within the digital content industries.