1.
Gender Inclusive
Regional Studies
Al James
al.james@ncl.ac.uk
@Re_AlJames
Regional Studies Association Conference
Lugano, Switzerland, 5 June 2018

2.
Gender Inclusive
Regional Studies
Brings regional learning and innovation
agenda into new conversation with labour
geography
Documents everyday struggles of high tech
professionals to combine work, home and
family.
Demonstrates how employer–provided
′family friendly′ working arrangements can
also enhance firms′ capacities for learning
and innovation.
Exposes masculinist myopia of regional
learning and innovation agenda and
attendant theories of regional advantage.
150 firms (employing 8000),
300 IT workers, 10 years of research,
UK & Ireland

3.
Entry 1: Demystifying the Geographical
Foundations of Regional Advantage
 Widely accepted: fundamental changes within
advanced economies 1970s- herald new era of
capitalist economic development
 Geography of this new order marked by ‘re-
emergence of regional economies’ as salient
foci of wealth creation.
 Multiple labels: industrial districts, new
industrial spaces, territorial production
complexes, regional innovation milieux,
learning regions, clusters
 A geographical research obsession! – 3+
decades of work to explain regional
(dis)advantage
 From transaction costs reductions to socio-
cultural analyses: careers made, an expansive
research literature, a cornerstone of regional
studies, multiple generations of PhD students!

4.
Demystifying Regional Advantage:
Major RQs, Successive Refinements
 Why do some regional economies perform better than
others?
 Mechanisms through which learning and innovation
are enhanced through spatial proximity?
 How are clusters inserted into knowledge spillovers at
different spatial scales?
 Constraints on learning, and innovation and growth
amongst knowledge intensive firms in industrial
clusters?
Moving beyond earlier distinctions between tacit and
codified knowledge:
 analytical (science-based), symbolic (arts-based)
versus synthetic (engineering-based) knowledges
 ‘component’ vs. ‘architectural’ knowledges
 ‘know-what’, ‘know-why’, ‘know-how’, ‘know-who’
 multi-scalar boundaries of innovation systems /
‘deterritorialisation of closeness’
 Phew…

5.
‘Neither of the NEGs [New Economic Geographies]
pays any attention to questions in the immediate
sense of the social division of labour between
different kinds of paid work and between paid work
and caring, or the wider sense of establishing
sustainable regional development. Yet these
dimensions are central to understanding the well-
being of people within regions and therefore to
regional or spatial development as a whole’ (Perrons
2001: 211).
‘Holistic regional development’ agenda (Pike et al. 2006
2007): integrates economic concerns around
competitiveness, growth and productivity with normative
questions around workers’ quality of life, gender equality,
well-being and social reproduction (see also Rees 2000;
Morgan 2004; Blake and Hanson 2005)
Calls to Recenter the Regional Learning
and Innovation Agenda

6.
(Re)Theorising (Masculinist) Regional Advantage
Three analytical myopias (James, 2018)
1.Labour / ‘human capital’ factor input to production
(cf. workers’ experiences being used as labour?)
2.Theoretical invisibility of female worker agency
3.Abstraction of knowledge production from social
reproduction (role of family and care in shaping
regional learning dynamics?)
Strong legacy in earlier studies (e.g. Saxenian’s (1994)
romanticised ‘Silicon Cowboys’ (11k citations & counting)
Cf. increasing numbers of female high tech professionals
Gendering regional advantage: Massey (1995) on high tech
monasteries, Benner (2003) on female-dedicated cross-firm
learning infrastructures, Gray and James (2007, 2008) on
constrained female agency in high tech.
But ltd engagements with expansive work-life agenda
(responds to same post-Fordist economic transition)

7.
Lazzeretti, L., Sedita, S.R. and Caloffi, A. 2013. Founders and disseminators of cluster research.
Journal of Economic Geography. Bibliometric analysis of 1586 journal articles on clusters /
industrial districts published from 1989 to 2010 in 250 international scientific journals)
Also note lack of female
scholars in this list…

8.
Entry 2: Gendered Work-Life Conflict
(or, when the Silicon Cowboys and Cowgirls hang up their spurs)
TRIPLE WHAMMY:
1. Working longer, harder, less predictable
schedules
2. Increased female labourforce; more dual
earner & lone-parent households; complex
household lives
3. Neoliberal attack on social provisioning –
transfer care down to ‘natural’ level of home
(Bakker and Gill 2003) - women typically
assume majority burden
 Complex, multi-variable juggling act: workers
have finite time and energy
Work Foundation (Cowling 2005): Ireland and UK
have the longest ave work hrs of all EU
members states

9.
Evidencing the Profound Social &
Economic Importance of WLB
Lack of WLB: increased stress, negative effects on
psychological and physical well-being, increased
family and marital tensions (multiple studies)
Emerging evidence Ireland: ‘quarter life crisis’ (?)
Unions: WLB to improve workers’ quality of life &
combat increasing work pressures that are
destabilising households
BUT: employers remain sceptical of ‘business case’
Ongoing govt refusal in firms’ right to manage
Limited evidence base: how employer provided WLB
provision can enhance firm performance
Also: no analysis of impacts of WLB provision on
firms’ innovative capacities (long term sustainable
advantage); firms atomised from regional
industrial systems

10.
Policy Type Description Examples
Flexible Work
Arrangements
Policies designed to give
workers greater
‘flexibility’ in the
scheduling and location
of work hours while not
decreasing average work
hours per week
Flextime (flexible beginning or end work time, sometimes with
core hours)
Flexplace / Telecommuting (all or part of the week occurs at
home)
Job sharing (one job undertaken by 2 or more persons)
Annualised hours
Reduced Work
Hours
Policies designed to
reduce workers’ hours
Part-time work
Compressed work weeks (employees compact total working
hours into 4 days rather than 5)
Term-time working
Practical Help
with Child Care
Policies designed to
provide ‘workplace social
support’ for parents
Employer-subsidised childcare – in-site
Employer-subsidised childcare – off-site
Information service for childcare
Workplace parent support group
Breast-feeding facilities
Personal Leave Policies and benefits that
give leave to provide time
for personal commitments
& family caregiving
Extra-statutory maternity leave
Extra-statutory paternity leave
Adoption leave
Unpaid leave during school holidays
Guaranteed Christmas leave
Use of own sick leave to care for sick children
Leave for caring for elder relatives
Emergency leave
Study leave
Sports achievement leave
Employer Provided WLB (vs. Scepticism)

11.
RQs, Methodology, Evidence Base
1. Gendering of everyday work-life conflict & workers’ preferred WLB
support in high tech regional economies?
2. How do WL conflict and uneven WLB provision by employers
shape worker mobility and hence interfirm embodied knowledge
transfers within and between firms?
3. Conditioning role of regional and national institutional and
regulatory frameworks?
Dublin and Cambridge IT regional case studies (EU
‘blueprint’ regions) + longest EU work hours (national)
65 in-depth interviews (working parents, HR
managers, unions, industry watchers)
Online employer survey: 150 firms (8068 workers,
20% female workforce): WLB provision & performance
Online IT worker survey: 162 workers (WLB & mobility)
(only 9 men! hard to convince WLB goes beyond women)
Policy engagement: UK: TUC, Amicus, GirlGeeks, WIT
Ireland: ICTU, SIPTU, Irish Equality Authority, WITS

12.
 Major causes of work-life conflict
Highly variable workloads over devt cycle
Need for rapid response to client crises
International work teams in multiple time zones
Maintaining skill sets in dynamic IT sector
 Everyday experiences of work life conflict
interrupted sleep patterns
stress and exhaustion
regular evening and weekend working
relationships with partner / children suffer
working (at home) when feeling unwell
missing out on leisure / hobbies
checking email in hospital close to child birth
 Particular pressures on women with children: identity of ‘a good mother’
invokes an everyday presence and involvement in childrearing absent from
dominant societal expectations ‘a good father’ (see Hardhill and van Loon 2006)
‘Agents of Innovation’? Cf. Everyday
Work-Life Conflicts (Highly Gendered)
“If you just try and deal with
it, you’ll just muddle through,
same as you always have.
But, the only way I could
make a decision for us as a
family was to play it forward
20 yrs. OK, there would be
more money in the bank,
that’s if we’re still talking to
each other, if the kids haven’t
gone off the rails because we
haven’t had time to sit down
and talk anymore...” Female
Business Devt Manager, now
on 3 day work week, Dublin

13.
Atomised ‘Agents of Innovation’???
‘The active units behind the formation of new knowledge are ‘epistemic communities’,
simply defined as groups of knowledge-driven agents linked together by a common
goal, a common cognitive framework and a shared understanding of their work’
(Cohendet et al. 2014: 930).
‘Agglomeration does not ensure learning or determine its content. [Rather] the use and
development of information in such a way that technological learning takes place has to
do with the qualitative behaviours of agents in a network’ (Storper 1997: 135).
‘I’m the CEO of [IT company] and I’m also the mum of two kids… Pretty much the stress
comes from wanting to be successful at work, and also wanting to be successful as a
mother, or wanting to be successful at a hobby, or wanting to do a lot of different things
and having the conflict’. Chief Executive Officer, female, IT start-up, UK SE region.
‘I was working for [large IT firm], and in my last year I had my son. I had 300 people
working for me: you think to yourself “I eat nails for breakfast, I’m gonna have a child
and I’ll be right back in there, grrrr,”. And the reality is, it’s not that way, because all of
a sudden you have something that you actually care more deeply about than your job’.
CEO, female, 2 children, MNC, UK SE region.

14.
Diverse Worker Preferences Vs.
Uneven and Ltd Employer Provided Support
Category Arrangement Dublin
(N=74)
%
Cambridge
(N=76)
%
Flexible Work
Arrangements
Flextime
Flexplace (work from home 1 or 2 days a week)
Flexplace (work from home 3 or 4 days a week)
Job sharing (one job undertaken by 2 or more persons)
Annualised hours
73
74
35
9
8
61
58
53
4
11
Reduced Work Hours Part-time work
Compressed work weeks (4 days work in 5)
Term-time working
49
31
8
59
29
9
Personal Leave Extra-statutory maternity leave
Extra-statutory paternity leave
Career break / sabbatical
32
14
19
12
9
7
Practical Help with
Child Care
Employer-subsidised childcare
Information referral service for childcare
Workplace nursery
4
4
3
8
3
1
Other WLB counselling / training 15 4

15.
WLB - Routine Learning Benefits
Employer Survey
Perceived impacts of WLB provision on
organisational performance (2004-7) (N=142)
 Improved workplace envt for creativity
and learning: 54%
 Increased worker productivity: 61%
 Improved company image to potential
recruits: 63%
 Increased retention of women post
maternity leave: 52%
 Increased workforce diversity: 44%
 Increased female recruitment: 36%
Consistency with multiple metrics of firm
performance over same timeframe
In-depth Interviews
Workers & Managers
Three key mechanisms through which
uptake of worker preferred WLB
arrangements benefits routine learning:
 Worker self-determination and
increased engagement
 Reduced stress and improved
quality of team communication
 Enhanced capacity for
comprehensive problem solving
 Work team diversity
 Diversity of external networks

16.
Uneven Employer WLB Provision: Impacts on
Labour Mobility (worker survey)
Differential WLB provision shapes
workers’ inter-firm job-to-job mobility
preferences (often with pay cut)
Worker survey evidence (N=122):
 Ave tenure: 3.5 yrs (excl 19% non-
movers)
 WLB provision not useful previous
firm: 41%
 PUSH: poor WLB in previous firm as
important reason for leaving: 33%
(39% for working mothers)
 PULL: better WLB provision in
current firm as important reason for
moving: 65% (76% for working
mothers)
 Interviews: key role of managerial
non-ratification of WLB take-up
(push)
“I rejected a job offer from a company
closer to home because they were not
open to the idea of working from home
or even starting 30 minutes later than
others (to sync my commute with my
wife)!” Male Software Engineer, Dublin
“The previous company I had a very
tough time and that’s the main reason
for me to look elsewhere. So one of
my children has a health problem, and
I’m receiving on the other side
pressure from my boss: ‘when are you
coming back to work? Enough of your
rest’. That’s what I’m hearing, but I’m
not resting there I’m struggling with
my kid you know?” IT Specialist,
mother of young twins, Cambridge

17.
Unpacking Labour Churning, Cross-Firm
Job-To-Job Mobility & Knowledge Transfer
 ‘One of the most important sources of
knowledge flows is the knowledge
embodied in highly qualified personnel
which flows directly from research
institutes to private firms in the form of
graduates and also moves between firms
in the form of mobile labour… the
recombining of talent in new
constellations through labour mobility is
[…] one of the most important sources of
innovation in dynamic clusters’. (Wolfe
and Gertler 2004: 1076)
 Well rehearsed set of arguments,
however…

18.
Knowledge Spillovers & Spatial Advantage:
(Beyond) The Regional Learning Boys’ Club?
 Majority insights from male / genderless ‘labour mobility’:
 Henry and Pinch (2000) Oxford’s Motorsport Valley: cross-firm
labour churning of designers, managers, engineers every 3.7 yrs, 8
moves per career, 100 career biographies all male
 Almeida and Kogut (1999): track US regional variations in knowledge
spillovers in the semiconductor industry via 483 patent holders, 473
male, only 10 ‘star engineers’ female
 Power and Lundmark (2004): track mobility of 1.1 million
ICT professionals in Kista science park
Sweden (29% female) –
impressive time-series database lumped together as genderless
mass
 Other gender-blind examples: Keeble et al. (1999); Fallick et al.
(2005); Lawton-Smith and Waters (2005); Agrawal et al. (2006); and
Breschi and Lissoni (2009).
 Instrumental, dehumanised language of ‘labour market
externalities’; or else of ‘mobile labour’ / ‘knowledge carriers’ /
‘human capital stocks’ / even ‘mobile brains’ as apparently
disembodied factor inputs to knowledge production

19.
Gendered work-life conflict, WLB and
constrained job-to-job interfirm mobility
 Question assumption: interfirm job-to-job mobility always
and everywhere ‘good’
 Disruptive effects on family support networks,
established school runs, etc – i.e. complex temporal and
spatial coordination of caring activities (urban
carescapes)
 Interviews: female (and some male) IT workers who stay put as a
function of WLB considerations
 Dominant atomistic conceptions of self-motivated, ideal worker
inter-firm job hopping in regional learning literature also ignore:
 Trailing spouse syndrome
 Devaluation of female embodied knowledge through
compromise jobs in other sectors chosen not for individual
utility but family utility (Folbre 1994)
 Myriad of ‘glass ceiling’ structures that further undermine
female worker mobility (extensive occupational mobility
literature)

20.
Uneven Regional Geographies of
Work-Life Advantage
Overall: Dublin workers having a harder time: 46% Dub IT workers
unsatisfied with current WLB (c.f. 30% Cam IT workers)
Interviews highlight Dublin urban sprawl (Celtic Tiger, house price
growth, longer commutes): 19% of Dublin workers surveyed commute 3 or
more hours per day (c.f. 7% of Cambridge workers)
Differences in gendered welfare regime:
 NO statutory provision for paternity leave in Ireland
 NO legal right to work PT in Ireland (employer discretion)
 Statutory maternity leave lower in Ireland c.f. UK
 Ireland’s higher costs of childcare in relation to average
incomes
i.e. ‘employer provided extra-statutory maternity / paternity leave’ has a
different meaning in Dublin c.f. Cambridge
(Im)mobility effect? e.g. 57% Dublin IT employers report increased female
retention post-maternity leave as a function of their WLB provision 2004-7
(c.f. 42% Cambridge)

21.
Concluding Comments
 Book opens up unexplored dimensions of high tech regional economies
(labour, gender, family)
 How workers’ embeddedness in gendered, reproductive networks of family,
care and community shapes their (non)participation in routine learning and
innovation activities of knowledge production
 Employer provided WLB arrangements important (yet under-researched)
element of firms’ institutionalised learning envts
 CORE TENSION: worker mobility so widely celebrated in regional learning and
innovation literature (and policy) as underpinning regional competitiveness
also premised on:
 Gendered dissatisfaction with work-life conflict, unequal division of
household labour, uneven & often inadequate employer WLB provision,
concerns beyond ‘the economic’ around care & improved quality of life.
 Gender exclusions in regional studies yielding partial, undersocialised
regional learning characatures… & dessicated regional development policy
 Engendering regional studies - need to reright the boat!!

22.
′Who thought the topic of work–life
balance could be so interesting? Al
James makes it riveting. His sometimes–
poignant, sometimes heart–rending,
sometimes outrageous (how can they get
away with that?) stories of the collision of
work–lives and every–day lives of high–
tech workers in Dublin and Cambridge
make for utterly compelling reading′
Professor Trevor Barnes, UBC.
′The changing nature of employment, the
growing diversity of the workforce and
the implications for individuals and
households are the questions of our time.
In this fascinating book, feminist and
regional economics meet head–on as
James provides insights into the
implications of the growth of ′′knowledge
work" for firms and for families.′
Prof Linda McDowell, Oxford.