IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jecgeo/v14y2014i3p483-510..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Work–life ‘balance’ and gendered (im)mobilities of knowledge and learning in high-tech regional economies

Author

Listed:
  • Al James

Abstract

Over the past three decades, economic geographers have explored how the spatial co-location of firms in regional industrial agglomerations helps foster learning, innovation and economic competitiveness. While recent work highlights the crucial role of labour mobility in promoting inter-firm ‘knowledge spillovers’, it pays little attention to how gendered responsibilities of care and personal-life interests beyond the workplace shape workers’ (non)participation in the relational networks and communities of practice widely theorized as enabling learning and innovation. This article presents new data from two regional economies: Dublin, Ireland, and Cambridge, UK. It documents the role of ‘work–life balance’ provision across IT employers in shaping the cross-firm mobility of workers and the tacit knowledge, skills and competencies which they embody. The article disrupts the powerful premise that ‘cross-firm labour mobility is always and everywhere good’ which informs much of the regional learning literature. It also contributes to emerging debates around ‘holistic’ regional development.

Suggested Citation

  • Al James, 2014. "Work–life ‘balance’ and gendered (im)mobilities of knowledge and learning in high-tech regional economies," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 14(3), pages 483-510.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:jecgeo:v:14:y:2014:i:3:p:483-510.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeg/lbt002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sergejs Gubins & Jos Ommeren & Thomas Graaff, 2019. "Does new information technology change commuting behavior?," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 62(1), pages 187-210, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jecgeo:v:14:y:2014:i:3:p:483-510.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/joeg .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.