Organisational Restructuring, Knowledge and Spatial Scale: The Case of the US Department Store Industry

Abstract

Recent economic geography literature has underlined the role of tacit/local knowledge in embedding firms within their locales, characterised by the work on ‘learning regions’, ‘territorial embeddedness’, ‘institutional thickness’ and ‘new industrial spaces’. This paper contributes to this theoretical debate, using evidence from organisational restructuring of the US department store industry to argue that, in contrast, retailers are using codified/universal knowledge, supported by tacit/local knowledge to successfully operate their retail operations across a range of spatial scales. As such, no one form of knowledge is exclusively relied upon but rather a blend of knowledges reduces costs and increases responsiveness across space.