Page - (000089) - in Knowledge and Networks

80 argued by Granovetter (1973). As bridges, family ties can channel knowledge fertil- ization between two groups; as strong ties, family bridges can be extremely helpful for technological learning that requires repeated communication and interaction. In traditional communities family bridges can enable entrepreneurs to learn business and technical know-how quickly. Traditional family structure is thus not a handicap of being less developed but rather an advantage for catching up. The second question requires interpreting the role of family networks for learn- ing from a dynamic perspective. After industrialization, regional economic growth relies more on technological innovation and knowledge creation than on resource utilization and business imitation. Being stable and hierarchical in structure, family networks are most likely to channel and bridge knowledge flows in one direction from fixed sources. Being localized, family ties are numerically restricted as translo- cal knowledge pipelines. The variety of knowledge pools in family networks there- fore tends to decline after rapid diffusion of technology. In that stage the significance of ties with friends tends to surpass that of family ties in encouraging knowledge creation, because friendship networks are more dynamic and open for new informa- tion than family ties are. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to document the transformation process from family- to friend-based learning. The challenge for many developing economies is that family networks in local business communities can quickly collapse in new generations of entrepreneurs while generalized trust and formal institutions as foundations for spontaneous associations of individuals take a long way to develop in societies. The great transition from family-based industrial communities to friend-based learning regions confronts developing economies and many developed areas alike. The turbulent global knowledge economy requires regions to develop global con- nections of transnational professionals and entrepreneurs regardless of their back- grounds, yet only a few leading clusters have successfully constructed a friendly social infrastructure to attract talented immigrants and mobilize innovation on a global scale. Divergence among clusters and regions may increase in the global knowledge economy along with the transition from closed to open social learning processes. In examining the dynamics of family networks from the perspective of learning in industrial communities, I do not tend to argue that there is a trend toward substi- tuting friends for families as the only, or even the main, social structure in societies. This dualistic interpretation of families and friends clearly does not hold from a sociological perspective. The family remains a basic part of social organization in modern societies and is not going to disappear. Acknowledgments I thank Johannes Glückler for the invitation to the conference on “Topographies and Topologies of Knowledge” and I am grateful to participants of the conference for their suggestions on this chapter as well as to the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Canada and the East China Normal University, Department of Urban and Regional Economics for supporting my work on the manuscript. The chapter has also been presented at the University of Toronto, National University of Singapore, and the annual meeting of Association of P. Li