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Evren, Yiğit; Akdoğan-Odabaş, Ezgi
2024 Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie
AbstractThe Turkish wine industry presents an interesting case to explore firm behaviour, institutions and regional economic resilience. With political Islam gaining popularity over the past two decades, the local industry has faced many challenges at the policy level. These include an enormous tax burden, bans on alcohol advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and the prohibition on online sales of alcoholic products. Under these conditions, many producers do not have the necessary skills to manoeuvre institutional challenges therefore economic survival mainly depends on local agents’ own capabilities. Understanding the resilience of an industry as such calls for an institutionally nuanced and agent-centric micro-level focus. In this context, the paper seeks to establish a theoretical framework that facilitates an explanation of how agents’ inherent systematic anomalies, biases and spatio-temporal cognitive limitations restrict their resilience and the twin notions of myopia and hypermetropia serve as the basis for our argument. The producer firms of the Thrace wine-making cluster in the northwest corner of Türkiye constitute our empirical focus. Our findings illustrate that the impact of adverse sectoral policies on local firms are heterogeneous and that there exists at least three types of winemaking firms in Türkiye depending on their agendas and cognitive (dis)abilities.
2024 Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie
AbstractThis paper explores how Ontario’s craft brewers created new as well as disrupted and changed existing institutions at local and regional levels in the province’s beer industry. Using a relational economic geography framework and a markets-as-practices perspective, this study highlights the brewer’s collaborative and pro-social practices, showing how close inter-firm relations and engagement with local communities resulted in resource mobilization such as better access to financial capital and greater social capital, which mobilized public support for the industry, and ultimately which helped individual and collective institutional work efforts succeed. The findings are significant as they show how actors in the industry overcame the constraints imposed on them in an oligopolistic market dominated by multinational firms. It also posits craft brewers acted individually at a local scale as institutional entrepreneurs, revisiting criticisms around this concept. This research contributes to understanding how localized market actors can achieve broader institutional change and offers insights into the relationship between market practices and institutional work, including entrepreneurship in craft industries.
Flögel, Franz; Schepelmann, Philipp; Zademach, Hans-Martin; Zörner, Michael
2024 Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie
AbstractAlthough small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute considerably to Germany’s carbon emissions, regional savings and cooperative banks − SMEs’ most important financiers − hardly consider this aspect in lending to these businesses. However, given Germany’s commitment to climate neutrality by 2045, suitable approaches for injecting climate finance into these SME lending processes are greatly required. Against this background, the paper at hand aims to introduce the specific case of regional banks into the debate on green finance and green banking and suggest future research in this context. In discussing the state of research on the peculiarities of regional savings and cooperative banks, we outline the resulting opportunities and limitations for climate impact assessments in SME lending. We argue that while the dual bottom-line orientation of regional banks in Germany precludes them from applying simple positive or negative screenings, their in-depth knowledge about local clients and circumstances enables them to be active and engaging partners for the green transformation of SMEs. Nonetheless, we explain why developing solutions to utilise this knowledge for climate finance by integrating climate impact assessments into routine lending processes remains a particularly challenging task.
Hansmeier, Hendrik; Kroll, Henning
2024 Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie
AbstractThe need to address environmental challenges through innovation-based transformative change has become more urgent than ever and the spatial dimension of pathways towards sustainability has attracted increasing scholarly interest. Over the last decade, research on environmentally oriented innovation has entered the geographical discourse from different directions. This paper starts with the premise that, among other contributions, two main directions of research can be identified within the current geographical discourse that do not yet interface much – a broad, yet conceptually more traditional debate on eco-innovation and a newer discourse around socio-technical transitions that adds a further perspective. Having justified this assumption by a short literature review, we perform a keyword-based literature search, which confirms that there are indeed two distinct bodies of literature and few studies to date that integrate features from both fields. Following this, an in-depth review of the sources clarifies the differences in perspective and the common object of analysis of the basic systemic elements of actors, institutions and technologies. While this juxtaposition illustrates why the two fields of research have hardly cross-fertilised each other so far, it also shows that they are in substance far from irreconcilable. On the contrary, the nuanced synthesis of research findings reveals numerous complementarities that constitute promising avenues for future geographical research. These are considered necessary to improve the understanding of the geography of innovation-based transitions towards sustainability.
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