Page - (000028) - in Knowledge and Networks

16 into a city and amplifying opportunities for technological recombination. Conversely, the greater the reliance on external relations governed by gatekeepers, the less the impact on the expansion and renewal of a city’s knowledge base. Distributed, net- worked learning processes are widely touted as a basis for superior performance. Recognizing a lack of knowledge about how learning networks operate in the aggregate, Christopher Ansell, Martin Lundin, and Per Ola Öberg seek to widen the view on networks and learning. They take an explicitly geographical perspective into account by utilizing a unique dataset on learning among Swedish municipali- ties. The authors find that municipalities learn from their near neighbors, especially those in the same county. This research also provides evidence that Swedish munici- palities are a “small world” linked together at the national level. Two mechanisms knit the Swedish municipalities together. First, county seats serve as “hubs” that bind local clusters. Second, local clusters aggregate into regional clusters. Despite a high degree of local clustering, hubs and regions provide a structural basis for the national diffusion of policy ideas and practices among Swedish municipalities. In the final chapter of the book, Uwe Cantner, Susanne Hinzmann, and Tina Wolf take a dynamic approach to investigating the coevolution of cooperation ties and various dimensions of proximity between potential collaboration partners. Specifically, they highlight the predominant role of cognitive proximity for the con- tinuity of innovation-oriented alliances and take into account that this proximity changes over time. They find partner-switching more often than the repetition of collaboration. Neither knowledge transfer nor mutual experience with cooperation shows significant effects on repeated cooperation. Instead, the authors find coopera- tion to be favored by similarity (overlap) between the firms’ knowledge bases, an imbalance in the reciprocal potential for knowledge exchange, the general experi- ence the partners have with collaboration, and similarity in the degree of popularity of collaboration partners. Conclusion With this book we continue the interdisciplinary discussion on relational, geograph- ical, and knowledge perspectives. Researchers from different disciplines have long developed important insights from their very different perspectives, and every per- spective has its own strengths and weaknesses. In drawing on the strengths of each discipline and its specific point of view, the understanding of the interdependencies between networks, learning, and space becomes increasingly comprehensive. Collectively, the chapters in this volume are but a small step in this endeavor, yet we believe that all the contributions herein offer new research questions, alternative research designs, and discerning solutions to the issues to which they call attention. May it serve as a prospect and source of discoveries that will further expand inter- disciplinary inquiry into the nexus of geography, networks, and knowledge. J. Glückler et al.