Title：Sources of Regional Advantage: Emergence of a Global Knowledge Economy
Speaker：Victor Nee（Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor of Economic Sociology, Cornell University）
Host：Dung-Sheng Chen（Distinguished Professor. Department of Sociology, NTU）
Time：2024/12/12（Thur.） 12:30-14:00
Venue：Department of Sociology and Social Work R319
About the Speech
In the twenty-first century, the pace of technological change has accelerated in competitive markets, connecting and integrating national economies in the global economy. Knowledge spillover and network rewiring are social mechanisms in the emergence of a global knowledge economy enabling and guiding cumulative regional advantage. Global networks linked to research universities, knowledge workers and entrepreneurs channel the flow of ideas, technological knowhow and financial capital to support startup technology firms. Despite global interconnectedness, national political and market institutions remain resilient, rooted in path-dependent institutional arrangements and cultural-political beliefs. The question I explore is this: To what extent do country-level differences in institutional framework matter in testing a theory of emergence explaining behavioral patterns at the level of a metropolitan economy? Behavioral patterns of knowledge flow in cross-cutting network clusters confirm a linked social process facilitating innovation. As predicted by theory and derived hypotheses, the more expansive the knowledge spillover and network rewiring, the greater the volume of innovation activity enabling the founding of startup firms (Nee, Wang and Macy 2023; Nee and Wang 2024).
About the Speaker
Victor Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor of Economic Sociology at Cornell University. He is the Director of Cornell’s Center for the Study of Economy and Society. Nee has written widely on the new institutionalism in economic and organizational sociology, immigration and assimilation, and inequality, including his books, Remaking the American Mainstream (with Richard Alba), Longtime Californ’ (with Brett de Bary), and Capitalism from Below (with Sonja Opper), and articles in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Organization Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Social Science Research. His current research is focused on the emergence of new regional knowledge economies in the twenty-first century. Nee is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a Fellow of John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2006-2007) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1996-1997), and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1994-1995; 2015-2016). He was awarded an honorary degree in Economics by Lund University’s School of Economics in 2013.
