Rethinking the economic geography of innovation : a socio-cultural case study of the maker movement in Shenzhen, China

Abstract

Social and cultural factors have figured prominently in the geographical discussions on innovation. A systematic review of established paradigms about innovation as socially embedded and culturally inflected in mainstream economic geographical literature highlights the need to adopt more nuanced and open-ended epistemologies to address the increasingly diversified, mutated, and variegated geographies of knowledge-based activities in relation to a broad diversity of actors, identities, meanings, normative values, lived experiences, spatial forms, and relational typologies.

Building on a vast collection of works, comprising recent developments in social and cultural geography and cognate disciplines that attend to the social and cultural shaping of the “technoscape,” as well as various strands of intellectual currency in the broader literature of economic geography, this thesis takes stock of three key theoretical inquiries that reflect emerging epistemologies of the social and cultural constitution of innovation: (1) innovation encoded by variegated meanings of knowledge workers; (2) innovation articulating with lived material cultures of technology; and (3) innovation crisscrossed by various dimensions of inequalities and differences.

An in-depth, socio-cultural, and primarily qualitative case study of the maker movement in Shenzhen, China, serves to cast light on these theoretical inquiries. The three empirical chapters respectively explicate: (1) how the countercultural ethics of international maker communities and state-led developmentalism have co-shaped a local variant of the global maker movement; (2) how local makers have intervened in the global technology market by carving out a variety of techno-cultural niches based on user-producer engagement and a distributed production mode; and (3) how gender inequalities, global elitism, and neoliberal work ethics have cast a shadow over the vision of the socially flattened and unhierarchical nature of the maker movement, revealing that it is not immune to governmentality, discipline, power relationships, and inequalities.

At the heart of these theoretical and empirical attempts lies the aspiration to emancipate the social and cultural geographies of innovation from the straitjackets of social capital, relational assets, and market rationality. Overall, the core intellectual contribution of this thesis is a more nuanced and open-ended understanding of innovation in economic geography. In particular, innovation is rethought to be: (1) diffused in everyday experiences, practices, and politics in addition to being just an economic endeavor; (2) a decentered and heterogenous process widely distributed across diverse communities of knowing, contingent on socio-spatial relations in different forms and at different scales; (3) an uneven, striated, and hierarchized landscape scripted by and perpetuating sociocultural differentiations and unequal powers inherent in knowledge production. Wider theoretical implications of these emerging epistemologies can also be explored by bringing it into dialogues with other emerging paradigms in the social studies of the economy.