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AbstractRegional economic adaptability is a classical topic in economic geography. Studying the fall and necessary restructuring and adaptability of regional economies has a long tradition in Europe, whereas the non‐Western world is a blind spot particularly concerning the use of newer evolutionary theoretical concepts in analysing and explaining regional economic adaptability. The aim of this special issue is therefore to put an evolutionary perspective on industrial dynamics and regional economic adaptability in non‐Western countries, and by doing that to contribute to theorising back from non‐Western countries to mainly Western concepts on regional economic adaptability.

Modern theoretical concepts in economic geography are used to try to explain the positive sides of geographical clustering of industries. Of the few theoretical concepts which are used to try to explain the negative sides of clustering, that is, the decline of old industrial areas, evolutionary regional economics, in general, and the lock-in concept, in particular, are promising ones. Lock-ins have been furthest developed by Grabher in his study on the steel and coal-mining complex in the Ruhr Area, Germany. They can be considered as thick interfirm, institutional, and cognitive tissues aimed at preserving existing industrial structures and therefore unnecessarily slowing down industrial renewal. It is particularly in regions with political lock-ins in which the legacy of manufacturing endures. On the basis of a study on the restructuring of the textile industry in Westmünsterland in Germany, in this paper I analyse whether these kinds of lock-ins can also be observed in regions with strong concentrations of the textile industry, an industry that strongly differs from the above-mentioned steel and coal-mining complex. I show that the impact of lock-ins can be regarded as relatively weak in the textile region of Westmünsterland. Partly because of that, industrial renewal has been relatively successful, which in turn has kept lock-ins weak.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, systems of innovation have been used as a framework to explain differences in innovativeness between firms, industries and economies at local, regional, national and supranational levels. The main argument behind the discussions around systems of innovation is that firms are increasingly dependent on institutions in their direct environment for their innovativeness and thus competitiveness. In regional innovation systems, firms and other organisations are systematically engaged in interactive learning through an institutional milieu characterised by embeddedness. On the basis of these systems' governance infrastructure, a typology can be developed consisting of grassroots systems (with the highest level of regional embeddedness), integrated systems and dirigiste systems (with the lowest level of regional embeddedness). Based on empirical research on innovation support agencies in Kyongbuk-Taegu and Kyonggi, this paper shows that South Korea is characterised by dirigiste regional innovation support systems with a relatively low level of regional embeddedness. This dirigiste kind of system generates both excessively homogeneous innovation support agencies, which are not sufficiently focused on specific regional economic demand, and horizontal policy coordination problems due to the strong vertical dependencies of agencies in the regions to their sponsors in the central government.

Regional policy and technology policy increasingly converge into regional innovation policies in the Europe of regions. The comparison of technology-transfer networks in the German regions Baden-Württemberg and the Ruhr with the British region of the North East of England, makes clear that national political settings determine the political and financial power which regions have to devise their own policies. The region with the largest political autonomy, Baden-Württemberg, creates the most transparent technology-transfer network. In the North East of England, both regionally based organisations and initiatives from the central government emerged at the same time. This caused a considerable overlap between activities of 'economic development industry' and a lack of co-ordination.

Abstract
Although evolutionary economic geography has been popular in economic geography, it has also been criticized for, among others, a weak geographical conceptualization, which has become evident, particularly in empirical research on related and unrelated variety. Therefore, this paper advances a spatial ontology, which is embedded in critical realism and social constructivism, and will empower evolutionary economic geography to understand and explain the impact of both economic crises and grand societal challenges on regional economic change, in a more place and scale-sensitive manner. Moreover, and relatedly, it will enable a better understanding of the main drivers of regional economic change.

AbstractDrawing upon critical realism and the literature on theorising in social sciences, this article contributes to the understanding of theorising in economic geography by highlighting the role of context throughout the theory development process. By critically reviewing two key concepts in economic geography—related variety and knowledge bases—from a critical realist theory development perspective, scholars' sensitivity to local context through the whole theorising process is examined. We argue that the particular strength of economic geography with regard to advancing theory lies in the continuous application of concepts and theories (that is, generalities) within new contexts (that is, confrontation with new particularities).

AbstractIn recent decades, while place‐based policies and local development have attracted the interest of institutional economic geography, the issue of features of certain industries and how they are shaping and shaped by institutions at multiple spatial scales, has not been taken up sufficiently. This paper, based on a local creative industry—the Shanghai online games industry, which is an essential part of the new media sector, takes issue with it. It explores two aspects, namely how multi‐scalar institutions relate and influence the development of the online games industry in Shanghai and how local firms and entrepreneurs affect local and national institutions. It shows that the three aspects that are related to media sector in general and games industry in particular (i.e., cultural influence, technological significance, and economic value) matter much as they have resulted in diverse industry‐relevant policies and regulations devised by local and national states. Moreover, local firms and entrepreneurs with different capacities and characteristics also differ much in influencing the design of the industry‐specific institutions in the face of institutional voids.