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To Angela, from Rob and
To Wenyu, from Piers
List of Figures
2.1.
4.1.
5.1.
5.2.
5.3.
5.4.
5.5.
6.1.
6.2.
6.3.
6.4.
6.5.
6.6.
6.7.
6.8.
7.1.
7.2.
7.3.
8.1.
9.1.
List of Tables
4.1. Agents of innovation, transformation, and development for a cross section of cities and regions
4.2. Agents of innovation, transformation, and development in Manchester 1760–1830
4.3. Agents of innovation, transformation, and development in Glasgow 1770–1890
5.1. General features of economic growth systems in high- and low-growth cities of the UK
5.2. Index of Quality of Government by UK region
6.1.
6.2.
6.3.
6.4. Multilevel regression of sub-indices of emancipative values on psychocultural profiles
6.5. Multilevel regression of sub-indices of secular values on psychocultural profiles
6.6. Origins and destinations of migrants across UK localities by inclusive amenability psychocultural profile
6.7. Origins and destinations of migrants across UK localities by individual commitment psychocultural profile
6.8.
7.1.
7.2.
7.3.
7.4. Correlation matrix for political and labour agency measures
7.5. Correlation matrix for agency and values
7.6. Regressions of HAP on post-materialism
7.7. Regressions of HAP on values
7.8. Logit regressions of human agency actualization for entrepreneurial/labour change behaviours
8.1. Proportion of self-employed by whether personality traits are above or below the mean
8.2. Proportion of self-employed by whether community culture dimensions are above or below the mean 200
8.3. Regressions of self-employment on Engagement with Education and Employment, and Extraversion 201
8.4. Negative binominal regressions of entrepreneurial employment 208
8.5. Correlation coefficients for Labour/Entrepreneurial Agency Potential and economic development/ HAA measures 211
8.6. Pearson correlation coefficients for the REDI and HAP 214
9.1. Ordered logit regressions of economic, financial, and political outcomes 223
9.2. Ordered logit regressions of social outcomes, health, and well-being 227
1 Introduction
Behaviour and the Development Problem
1.1 The Motivation and Rationale for the Book
This book is motivated by a belief that theories of economic development can move beyond the generally known factors and mechanisms of such development, with the aim being to analyse deeper and more fundamental causes of uneven development. In particular, influences such as innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge, and human capital are widely acknowledged as key levers of development and are essentially some of the major components underlying Schumpeter’s (1934) enduringly influential book on ‘The Theory of Economic Development’. However, what are the sources of these factors, and why do they differ in their endowment across places? Principally, this book seeks to theoretically argue and to empirically illustrate that differences in human behaviour across cities and regions are a significant deep-rooted cause of uneven development. Fusing a range of concepts relating to culture, psychology, human agency, institutions, and power, it proposes that the uneven economic development and evolution of cities and regions within and across nations are strongly connected with the underlying forms of behaviour enacted by humans both individually and collectively.
Integrating theoretical and empirical analysis, this study addresses a clear intellectual gap in terms of making sense of the components and elements that lead to long-term differentials in economic development, particularly at the city and regional level. Following Nelson and Winter’s (1982) landmark publication An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, the process and dynamics of economic development are widely acknowledged to pursue evolutionary pathways resulting from particular forms of individual and organizational behaviour. However, both ‘traditional’ and so-called ‘alternative’ theories of economic development continue to pay little attention to the role of human behaviour in shaping economic evolution and change, particularly within a spatial context (Reinert et al., 2016). This is surprising given that human behaviour and the urban and regional economies in which
individuals are situated are fundamentally intertwined. The problem for scholars and policy analysts is that such behaviour does not easily fit into existing economic frameworks (Granovetter, 2017).
Urban and regional development theory is largely rooted in explanations based on the location, agglomeration and organization of firms, industries, and capital. While the field of economics has begun to embrace behaviourism, economic geography appears to have largely adhered to Sauer’s (1941: 7) contention that ‘Human geography . . ., unlike psychology and history, is a science that has nothing to do with individuals but only with human institutions or culture’. As Pred (1967) pointed out some years later, divorcing culture or institutions at the spatial level from the behaviour of individuals is logically a contradiction, since individual behaviour necessarily contributes to the formation and differences in these cultures and institutions. Indeed, the formation and subsequent outcomes of individual or collective behavioural action, or what can be termed human agency, are a central feature of our thesis, and one of the intellectual contributions it seeks to make is to provide a greater and more systematic understanding of the role of individual and collective behaviour in determining urban and regional development outcomes.
Given a world of finite and limited resources, coupled with a rapidly growing population—especially in cities and urban regions—human behaviour, and the expectations and preferences upon which it is based, would appear to be central for understanding how notions of development may change in coming years. In other words, the ‘prosperity’ associated with ‘development’ may come in different forms as values evolve, challenges change, and new opportunities emerge (Jackson, 2017). New economic and social frameworks are likely to form to address this evolution, especially frameworks based on understanding micro-level behaviour, and a key argument within this book is that the city or region in which individuals are situated will be deeply connected with their economic behaviour. Essentially, cities and regions shape behaviour, which itself subsequently impacts upon the economic development fortunes of these places, especially over the long term.
An underlying rationale of this approach is to address the fact that uneven development across cities and regions is a global phenomenon (Prager and Thisse, 2012), with the world now witnessing what Myrdal (1957) presciently described as the ‘drift toward regional economic inequalities’. In general, the historical evolution of cities and regions tends to be a story of gradually growing economic divergence across territorial boundaries, and the emergence of a limited number of urban and regional superpowers. In the Britain of 1891, for example, the region of Wales generated economic output per capita that equated to 96.2 per cent of the national average; similarly, in the
East Midlands output per capita was equal to 96.4 per cent of the British average (Crafts, 2004). By 2017, output per capita in Wales was only 72.2 per cent of the average, and 79.3 per cent of the average in the East Midlands. By contrast, London’s output per capita increased from 150.4 per cent in 1891 to 177.3 per cent in 2017, with regions in close proximity to the capital seeing similar rates of economic development.
Such evolutionary trends can also be observed elsewhere, and in some cases the speed of divergence has become ever more rapid. For example, in the United States the rise of an elite band of superstar cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, is fast becoming economically decoupled from cities and regions elsewhere in the nation, resulting in significantly widening development gaps (Florida, 2017). However, is the economic pre-eminence of these superstar cities assured in the long term? As Jane Jacobs (1961) describes and analyses with such real-world eloquence, when the distribution of power in a city or region becomes restricted to a relatively small number of human agents, the chances are that their longterm economic evolution and development prospects will be harmed. Jacobs (1961) argued that the narrow power base existing in cities such as New York in the 1950s and 1960s was a cause of urban and regional decline, and it is likely that the broadened distribution of power across wider networks of agency within such cities has led to their rejuvenation and heightened rates of economic development.
More generally, we propose that the rise in importance given to cultural values has led to the emergence of a ‘new sociology of development’ entwining the role of geography with factors relating to individual and collective behaviour (Sachs, 2000). Essentially, human behaviour is fundamental to the social sciences in terms of understanding what people do, where and why they do it, and the costs and benefits of this behaviour. In order to understand ‘aggregate’ differences in socio-economic activity and performance, it is informative to explore how these differences stem from the experiences and actions of individual and group actors.
Theoretically, we seek to build on conceptualizations relating to the geographical political economy of a city or region in terms of the role of agency and bounded determinacy (Pike et al., 2009). Nevertheless, the book argues that, although the geographical political economy approach seeks to understand how human agency may be incorporated into an understanding of urban and regional development, it has had less to say about the causes of differing behaviours within often similar spatial environments, which is a gap we seek to address. As Amin and Thrift (2017) argue, human behaviour comes from a meeting of the minds and bodies of individuals and the
machines and matter that form the ‘daily sociality’ provided and formed by the urban and regional environment. It is precisely this relationship between such human behaviour and the spatial environment that we aim to explore and analyse.
1.2 Behaviour and the Development Problem
Although growing inequalities can be observed across cities and regions within and across many nations (Florida, 2017), the search for equality is likely to be elusive and in many ways futile. Instead, the quest should be for ‘equity’ within and between cities and regions, which comes in the form of fairness in terms of access to opportunities and the capability and capacity for individual development, self-efficacy, and enhancement regardless of location. In order to consider issues of equity and equality, economic development theory—in particular urban and regional development theory—has been largely dominated by downstream perceptions based on explanatory factors relating to resources and capital and their allocation, as well as patterns of economic structure and the configuration of economic systems (Capello and Nijkamp, 2009). However, variations in economic performance are often not possible to explain through differences in traditional inputs such as labour and capital, even when accounting for human capital and knowledge production (Obschonka et al., 2015). Furthermore, economic growth does not necessarily result in ‘good development’, with low-quality growth manifesting itself through increased economic and social inequality (Stiglitz, 2013). More generally, while there has been some recent recognition that behavioural and cultural influences have a role to play in development processes, they have not been systematically considered, despite these influences potentially having a profound effect on the type of development sought and attained.
In terms of existing scholarly recognition, the role of institutions in fostering or constraining development is increasingly acknowledged (RodríguezPose, 2013), as well as three key interrelated concepts—culture, psychology, and agency—that provide a basis for establishing a framework facilitating an explanation of how behavioural factors interact and result in development differentials across cities and regions (Huggins and Thompson, 2019). In essence, behavioural theories of development are rooted in the relationship and interplay between cultural and psychological factors, with institutions acting as a moderator between intended and actualized behaviour. Such actualized behaviour comes in the form of the human agency impacting
upon urban and regional development outcomes. Furthermore, the nature of agency and institutions in a city or region will be dependent upon the role and forms of existing power and the extent to which this is distributed through particular networks that influence evolutionary patterns of development (Huggins and Thompson, 2019).
Given these scholarly advances, in recent years there have been moves toward a (re)turn to addressing the role of human behaviour in determining urban and regional development outcomes. In particular, psychocultural behavioural patterns may provide a basis for understanding the type and nature of human agency within cities and regions (Huggins et al., 2018). Furthermore, such agency is based on a rationality that is likely to be spatially bounded and intrinsically linked to the nature, source, and evolution of institutions and power. Given this, an integration of human behavioural aspects into urban and regional development theory offers significant potential for exploring and explaining long-term evolutionary patterns of development.
1.3 The Fundamentals of Behaviour and Development
As a way of sketching the fundamental issues and concepts relating to the role of human behaviour in fostering or hindering development, the rest of this chapter summarizes some of the arguments and findings in the remainder of this volume. Initially, Chapter 2 illustrates that the roots of behavioural differences across cities and regions are co-determined by two key factors, namely, socio-spatial culture and personality psychology. It is the interaction of these two factors that forms the behavioural intentions of individuals. Socio-spatial culture refers to the broader societal traits and relations that underpin places in terms of prevailing mindsets and the overall way of life within these places (Huggins and Thompson, 2015a). Personality psychology refers to one of the predominant paradigms in behavioural psychology for understanding and measuring differences in personality traits across individuals (McCrae and Terracciano, 2005). It is proposed that there is a relationship between socio-spatial culture and the aggregate personality psychology within cities and regions that is interactive and interdependent.
The interaction between psychological and cultural elements forms the basis of the spatially bounded psychocultural behavioural footprint of a city or region. However, this does not immediately lead to certain forms of behaviour or agency, but more to the ‘intentions’ of individuals to behave in a particular way. Therefore, it is argued that the combination of personality
A
psychology at the individual level and the socio-spatial culture of a city or region in which an individual is located co-determines the intention to behave in a particular manner. Institutions, however, may constrain or incentivize particular intentions, but also mould and enable habits, preferences, values, and actions. In essence, people create social systems, and these systems then organize and influence people’s lives (Bandura, 2006). Within a city or region, therefore, the translation of behavioural intentions to actual behaviour will be moderated by an institutional filter based on the underlying incentives and constraints to act in certain ways.
Actual behaviour is expressed through human agency, which can be defined as ‘acts done intentionally’ to achieve change or to deliberately reproduce previous actions. Therefore, the behaviour of individuals and collectives within cities and regions that is actualized will establish the types of human agency impacting upon the systems and trajectory of development. Furthermore, the level of development across cities and regions will depend on the nature of this human agency.
Existing studies have recognized the influence of institutions in constraining or enabling differing forms of behaviour (Van den Bergh and Stagl, 2003), while accepting the ability of individuals to take intentional, purposive, and meaningful actions (Hodgson, 2006). What is missing, however, is an understanding of how power affects the ability to deploy agency and achieve change, and it is important, therefore, to consider the nature and role of power with regard to agency that influences long-term development. This leads to the proposition that the possession and exercising of power determine the way in which agency influences the evolution and the form of urban and regional institutional filters.
Given the above, a long-term perspective on development should acknowledge that the genetic—encompassing personality psychology—evolution of humans and their cultural evolution are ultimately interactive, that is positive and negative interactions between cultural and biological evolution may occur and give rise to cultural-genetic co-evolution (Van den Bergh and Stagl, 2003). In Chapter 3, we shall see that the interaction between culture and psychology forms part of the complex adaptive systems that shape economic and social outcomes (Martin and Sunley, 2015a). Furthermore, as genetic and cultural factors can be considered co-evolutionary, in the context of urban and regional development outcomes existing theories may have greater explanatory power if more emphasis is given to spatio-temporal dimensions in terms of the relationship between current behaviour and behaviour in the middle or distant future. Drawing on data from the UK and the US, the ‘psychocultural life’ of cities and regions is examined to
understand differing types of behaviour and their relationship with development outcomes. An empirical analysis of cities and regions in the UK identifies and explores three underlying forms of geographic psychocultural behaviour— Diverse Extraversion, Inclusive Amenability, and Individual Commitment— that are found to be associated with rates of urban and regional development.
As discussed in Chapter 4, urban and regional histories concerning the formation and endurance of local cultures and institutions are central factors mediating the relationship between behavioural intentions and actualized human agency within a city or region. Institutions come in a multiplicity of forms through both formal rules and laws and, perhaps more importantly, informal conventions that either incentivize individuals to seek, or constrain them from seeking, to act out and actualize their initial behavioural intentions. Therefore, these institutions can be conceptualized as a filter through which intentions either flow into behavioural actions or become blocked or at least diluted. Indeed, institutions not only moderate human agency but are also themselves formed by such agency, something that is often neglected in some branches of economic geography, particularly that stemming from an evolutionary perspective (MacKinnon et al., 2009). Studies have highlighted the dangers of path dependence and institutional lock-in, but this does not take into account the endogenous activities that can lead to path creation (Martin and Sunley, 2006). In this sense, to be an agent is to intentionally make things happen by one’s actions (Bandura, 2001), and in order to unpack and delineate the forms of agency that potentially impact on urban and regional development outcomes, the field of psychology provides some useful pointers. In particular, the social cognitive theory proposed by Bandura (2001) distinguishes three modes of agency: personal agency in the form of the power to originate actions for given purposes; proxy agency that relies on others to act on one’s behest to secure desired outcomes; and collective agency exercised through socially coordinative and interdependent effort.
Bandura’s (2001) three forms of agency necessarily occur through a host of differing forms of agent within a city or region, but from the perspective of urban and regional development theory it is useful to identify with more precision the types of agent, agency, and action that are likely to achieve desired (or undesired) results and outcomes. Although a wide range of overlapping forms of agency at differing scalar levels can be considered, Chapter 4 argues that three meta-forms of localized agency are particularly likely to impact on urban and regional development outcomes, namely, entrepreneurial agency, political agency, and labour agency. These forms of agency and agent in a city or region are likely to be a key factor determining the level and types of development occurring. From the perspective of economic
development, agents will shape the structure, organization, and dynamics of industry within a city or region. In particular, they will determine: the types of capital—human, physical, knowledge, entrepreneurial, and the like—that are sought and invested in; the form of industrial structure and the range and rate of innovative economic activity; and the nature of industrial organization and dynamics, especially that concerning the governance and clustering of market and non-market economic activity, that is the economic systems of cities and regions, and their evolution. Taking a historic perspective, Chapter 4 indicates how the persistence of local cultures shapes the contemporary systems and dynamics of urban and regional economies.
If the human behaviour found in a city or region shapes its evolutionary development, it is necessary to explore how these behavioural elements interface and interact with more transparent and acknowledged developmental factors in the form of the structure, nature, and organization of firms within an economy, and more broadly the institutions and governance of the political economy (see Chapter 5). Fundamentally, within any city or region the interpersonal social networks formed by key agents establish the framework for the distribution of power, particularly power that impacts upon the evolution and development of the economy. To this end, Chapter 5 is structured around the proposition that the distribution of wealth and welfare creating power within a city or region is a function of the scale and nature of the social networks through which economically and socially beneficial knowledge flows.
Cities and regions that have more inclusive networks of this type are likely to be more advanced and developed, and will also be more equitable in terms of their access to opportunity and ability to partake in a fair urban and regional community. We argue that, across nations, leading urban regions often possess the most inclusive power networks and are also the most equitable. This is quite a controversial suggestion given that such places are usually considered to have the highest levels of inequality, but existing measures of inequality, such as income-based Gini coefficients, mask an understanding of the deeper behavioural considerations of prosperity differences within cities and regions.
Social network theory and analysis indicate that many of the most advanced cities and regions around the globe have relatively flat and open (equal) social networks with regard to developmental factors, while lagging cities and regions tend to be more hierarchical (unequal) and be populated by a relatively limited number of agents operating within elite ‘small world’ networks (Watts, 1999). Furthermore, engagement in these networks tends to be linked to the underlying personality traits of agents (Burt, 2012), which
means that, since more developed regions usually have more agents possessing an ‘openness’ to their behaviour, they are more likely to have flatter, more inclusive, and equitable networks.
Based on this line of reasoning, there has been a tendency to ignore the probability that not all agency is likely to have the same level of power, with some agents hindered by their position in terms of existing social networks, which may allow elites to capture urban and regional development agendas (Gregson, 2005). In effect, power can be viewed as an instrumental force, which reflects the ability to mobilize others to undertake activities they would not normally consider (Dahl, 1957). However, it can also be viewed in the softer sense of individuals coming together to achieve intended shared goals. It is important, therefore, to consider both perspectives, given that collaborative relations are themselves rarely completely harmonious and equal (Cumbers and MacKinnon, 2011).
As an outcome of these behavioural factors, cities and regions with the most equitable power networks are more likely to evolve as talent centres fuelled by ‘brain attraction’, with a rich base of knowledge workers, technology, and expertise, and dense and flexible labour markets. Such places will also have a higher propensity for public- and private-sector engagement in innovation, and higher rates of entrepreneurship and associated venture finance. As well as flat social networks, business network formation will be prevalent, coupled with a relatively plentiful opportunity to access entrepreneurial support mechanisms. There is also likely to be strong industrial clustering, especially among firms operating in highly tradable markets. Unfortunately, in cities and regions with inequitable and hierarchical socialpower networks the reverse is likely to be true, with the following being manifest: a stagnant and relatively low skills base, compounded by ‘brain drain’; weak labour markets; a low density of public- and private-sector engagement in innovation; below-average (national) rates of entrepreneurship and venture finance; and a lack of strong industry clusters. Given that economic-development theory largely points to these factors as being the key drivers of such development, such drivers are themselves shaped by the nature of power networks within and across cities and regions.
1.4 Empirically Testing the Theory
In order to fully examine the association between the nature of concepts such as personality psychology, culture, human agency, and institutions, as well as the causal impact on various factors relating to the economic
development of cities and regions, it is necessary to establish an empirical evidence base that assesses the theoretical connections discussed above. To achieve this, Chapters 6–8 quantitatively analyse the nature, source, and co-evolution of behavioural factors within cities and regions and their development capabilities. Chapter 6 empirically investigates the relationship between culture, personality psychology, and institutions at the city and regional level. It recognizes that any relationship between these constructs are likely to be bidirectional, with it being inappropriate to assume that one can be regarded as an independent factor that drives the other (Rentfrow et al., 2009, 2013). Therefore, the analysis examines the particular relationships between each of the three constructs in order to capture evidence on the existence of their intertwined nature.
Chapter 6 tackles issues relating to the requirements for examining culture, psychology, and institutions more broadly. This is achieved through a discussion of each of the constructs in terms of how they have been captured in previous work, for example Beugelsdijk and Maseland (2011) in terms of culture in economics, and Rodríguez-Pose’s (2013) discussion of institutions for economic development. The focus here is on the theoretical differences between the three constructs, and having outlined the broad issues that need to be resolved when measuring the three constructs, the chapter further examines existing empirical studies of culture (for example Tabellini, 2010; Huggins and Thompson, 2016), personality psychology (Rentfrow et al., 2015), and institutions (Charron et al., 2014) to critically examine the different available measures of each. The analysis is undertaken both at an urban and regional level using the UK as a case study, but also across nations where formal institutions are likely to play a stronger role. It draws upon data covering regions in Europe for international analysis, while focusing on cultural measures developed at the urban and regional level by Huggins and Thompson (2016) and personal psychology variables from the BBC psychology lab dataset (Rentfrow et al., 2015). Mechanisms such as selective migration are examined to provide evidence of their role in the generation of particular personality psychological profiles, cultures, and formal institutions.
Whereas Chapter 6 seeks to understand the interactions between culture, psychology, and institutional factors, Chapter 7 focuses on explaining how these interactions impact on the agency of individuals in cities and regions. This is accomplished through a focus on measuring agency in its different forms and examining the influence of this agency. Sen’s (1985) perspective of agency as a situation whereby individuals are free to undertake activities and pursue particular goals of importance to them is instructive in understanding how agency relates to participation in various activities concerning
economic development. There are a number of different measures of agency (Alkire, 2005), which according to Sen (1999) can be distinguished through four dimensions: global or multidimensional; direct control or effective power; well-being and freedom; and autonomy or ability. Such dimensions include components relating to mobility, decision-making, and a sense of self-worth (Jejeebhoy et al., 2010), and power is an important part of the analysis, with many definitions of agency referring to it as the ability to make choices either individually or collectively (Ozer and Bandura, 1990; Bandura, 2000; Alsop et al., 2006).
To address these issues, the analysis undertaken here utilizes measures from the European Social Survey (Kaasa et al., 2010), as well as considering measures such as those associated with self-efficacy, that is the perception of individuals in terms of their capability to pursue particular goals (Bandura, 1997), and the autonomy element of self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000). These are discussed in terms of understanding some of the fundamental building blocks of agency such as the nature of Human Agency Potential (HAP) and Human Agency Actualization (HAA), and the analysis focuses on the role of cultural values, as well as forms of political, labour, entrepreneurial, and environmental agency (Lee and Peterson, 2000). This facilitates a broader range of urban and regional development measures to be considered, with Chapter 8 focusing more particularly on an analysis of the relationship between agency and the presence of entrepreneurial and innovative activities within cities and regions.
Although entrepreneurial activity is often proxied by new venture creation data, Chapter 8 recognizes broader measures of entrepreneurial activity. This is intended to reflect the fact that entrepreneurial activity is not restricted to small business ownership and new venture creation but may also encompass entrepreneurial agency within larger established businesses and the public sector (Rae, 2010). To account for this broader interpretation of entrepreneurship, data is drawn not only from traditional sources but also from alternatives such as measures based on entrepreneurial orientation (Khandwalla, 1977; Knight, 1997; Miller and Friesen, 1978), In summary, the chapter empirically determines the extent to which agency actually results in economically beneficial entrepreneurship and innovation across cities and regions.
1.5 Modelling and Addressing Behaviour and Uneven Development
Building upon both the theoretical and empirical analysis, in Chapter 9 we establish an extended Behavioural Model of Economic Development
encompassing the key elements and relationships that link them in order to provide a more complete understanding of economic development. This is accomplished by considering how constructs can be captured in a compatible manner and exploring the design of an empirical estimation strategy to account for personality psychology, culture, institutions, and agency within an urban and regional economic development model. First, consideration is given as to how economic development may be best captured. This includes assessing measures that have been traditionally utilized such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth (McCann and Ortega-Argilés, 2015), employment (Fratesi and Rodríguez-Pose, 2016), and average income (Rattsø and Stokke, 2014). It also takes into consideration the argument that development needs to account for the needs of the residents of a city or region itself (Pike et al., 2007). This means expanding the discussion to incorporate concepts such as competitiveness (Huggins and Thompson, 2017a) and resilience (Martin, 2012; Martin and Sunley, 2015b), as well as acknowledging that different measures may affect the patterns observed across regions and cities (Cellini et al., 2017). Also, there is a requirement to consider broader measures of development, such as those associated with wider notions of well-being (Frey and Stutzer, 2000; Huggins and Thompson, 2012; Puntscher et al., 2015).
Chapter 9 discusses future developments that are required to extend knowledge concerning the development role played by personality psychology, culture, agency, and institutions from an empirical standpoint. This is achieved through critically examining the empirical analysis undertaken in the chapter, as well as the three preceding chapters, and the measures included within them. In particular, attention is paid to limitations with regard to available data at different levels of spatial aggregation and the timeliness of variables. Methodological issues and potential solutions are discussed in relation to the empirical tools available.
In bringing the book to a conclusion, Chapter 10 seeks to focus on policy and the levers for change, highlighting that uneven economic development across cities and regions is the result of historic long-term evolutionary behavioural processes whereby the psychological, cultural, and economic dimensions of cities and regions continually reinforce each other, for better or worse. In particular, psychocultural behaviour has the potential to be persistent and deeply rooted in previously dominant economic activities, so that its influence is felt many decades later. For example, historically high levels of mining are found to be associated with lower levels of entrepreneurial activity (Glaeser et al., 2015), positive attitudes to collective behaviour
in the form of unionism (Holmes, 2006), and preferences against redistribution (Couttenier and Sangier, 2015).
In the context of mature cities and regional economies in advanced nations, there are strong reasons to suggest that the concentration of large-scale traditional industries in these regions has left a lasting psychological imprint on local culture, with selective outmigration resulting in more optimistic and resilient individuals with relatively positive and agentic mindsets seeking new environments that offer new economic opportunities, leaving an indigenous population in the home region that is often lacking in ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ (Stuetzer et. al. 2016; Obschonka et al., 2017).
As a means of addressing the unevenness resulting from the differing ‘spirit’—in other words, psychocultural behaviour—across cities and regions, the mix of political, worker, and entrepreneurial agency will determine the development fates of these places. In particular, entrepreneurs represent key catalysts of change, and throughout history urban and regional transformation has been catalysed by a core group of entrepreneurial agents that have taken a lead in positively evolving the economies in which they are physically situated, with new generations of agent often producing innovations that further push forward the technological frontier set by their predecessors. In mature and less developed urban and regional economies it is all too often the case that these types of agents have migrated to other regions with stronger ecosystems and greater opportunities, or that the underlying psychocultural traits of the region have meant that such agency has not been nurtured in the first instance. This leaves these cities and regions in an economic situation in which they lack a critical mass in the types of industries and sectors through which value and competitiveness can be best achieved.
It is concluded that while the above points to the role of policy in attracting, retaining, and supporting existing agents, the key to renewal and transformation is likely to lie with the nurturing of new indigenous agents. One route, which is necessarily a long-term one, to achieving this is through changes to urban and regional education systems, especially those that seek to provide individuals with the mindsets resembling the ‘extrovert’ entrepreneurial agents that are considered to be central to resilient urban and regional ecosystems (Martin and Sunley, 2011).
