Personal and commercial networks in an English port: Chester in the early eighteenth century

Stobart, Jon

doi:10.1016/s0305-7488(03)00031-8

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Within these and related studies, trust is often viewed as an important contributing factor to local development (Bellandi, 2001;Henry and Pinch, 2001;Bathelt and Taylor, 2002), the creation of clusters, learning regions, and institutionally 'thick' places (Grabher, 1993;Amin and Thrift, 1993;Cooke and Morgan, 1998;Nadvi, 1999;Helmsing, 2001), the stabilization and legitimization of place identities (Hudson, 1998), the creativity, solvency, and innovativeness of firms (Banks et al, 2000;Murphy, 2002;Nijkamp, 2003;Glückler, 2005), and the historical development of commercial and business networks (Winder, 2001;Stobart, 2004). Moreover, trust facilitates the transfer of codified information, tacit forms of knowledge, and 'soft' technologies between places and the trust-building processes used in and by firms can tell us much about how workplaces, clusters, value chains, and production networks are constructed (Ettlinger and Patton, 1996;Malecki and Tootle, 1996;Ettlinger, 2003;Gertler, 2003;Bathelt et al, 2004;Mackinnon et al, 2004).…”

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confidence: 99%

Building Trust in Economic Space

Murphy

2006

Progress in Human Geography

134

112

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While there is widespread recognition of the importance and role of trust in facilitating regional development, technology transfer, and agglomeration economies, the concept remains rather undertheorized within economic geography and regional science. This paper reviews and assesses the literature on the role and constitution of trust for economic and industrial development and presents a conceptualization of the trust building process that accounts for the influences of agency, institutions, materials, and interpersonal expression. In doing so, geographic concerns about the role of space and context are linked to economic and sociological conceptualizations of trust and to scholarship from actor-network theory (ANT) and social psychology regarding the influence of power, non-human intermediaries, and performance on social outcomes and network configurations. The result is a heuristic framework for analyzing trust-building processes as temporally and spatially situated social phenomena shaped by context-specific subjective, intersubjective, and structural factors. The conceptualization’s broader significance lies not in detailing the many factors that influence trust but in its contextualization of the micro-social processes that can strengthen business relationships. In doing so, the framework can facilitate a move beyond solely instrumental conceptualizations of trust and toward a relational understanding of how the means for establishing and sustaining trust influence the development and potential of such ‘ends’ as clusters and production networks.

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confidence: 99%

Building Trust in Economic Space

Murphy

2006

Progress in Human Geography

134

112

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“…The gilds and regulated companies were shells within which individual and families operated; and the joint-stock could survive only as an organic part of a matrix of informal practices. Merchants in the seventeenth century in, say, Chester did not make a distinction between personal and business networks: business was personal, and these networks of relationships were vital to maintaining local and long-distance trade (Stobart 2004). As for the modern corporation today, the more informal are among the most successful or so Morand (1995) argues.…”

Section: The Problem With Informalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Global South and North: Why Informality Matters

Hodder¹

2016

New Global Studies

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Informality in the global south thought to matter because it is a threat, or a stage on the road, to (or embedded in) formality; or because it is a permanent condition acceptable on its own terms and has the potential to keep formal bureaucratic organizations running and in touch with citizens. These understandings of informality also share an assertion: that the quality of informality is different -almost genetically so -from formality. The purpose of my remarks here is to point this discussion in another direction. I argue that the difference between informality and formality is only conceptual. The supposition that there exists in fact an informal-formal dichotomy, dualism or dialectic, and its use as an analytical lens, produces apparent features which it cannot easily account for. I illustrate these features and then go on to sketch out another approach and its implications. New Global Studies 2016; aop Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/13/16 12:46 PM spontaneous, off-the-books, and outside established routines and practice; and a wider context in which capital and advanced technology are scarce and labor is used intensively. Measures of the extent of informality in the developing world also vary but are striking. About 50 % of employment and 30-40 % of all economic activities are thought to be informal. Figures are higher for some activities and in some regions. A good proportion (60-70 %) of manufacturing across the developing world is said to be informal. In Latin America, about half of the salaried workforce is informal, while figures for the urban workforce alone range from 30 to 70 %. Proportions of the labor force in informal employment rise to 72 % in sub-Saharan Africa and to 65 % in Asia. (See Galiani and Weinschelbaum 2012; Maloney 2004; Moreno-Monroy 2012; Funder and Marani 2015; Maiti and Mitra 2011).In establishing a reasonably distinct and tangible phenomenon for analysis and enumeration, collections of features which are necessarily recurring, predictable, and quantifiable are required, together with an assertion that informality is different -almost genetically so in some instances -from formality. A number of accounts or understandings of "informality" follow from this. First, informality is a barrier to progress. It delineates a detached sector producing different (and inferior) products with different (and inferior) labor and with little capital (see, for instance, La Prota and Shleifer 2014). Enterprises are inefficient and poorly managed, have low employment growth rates, seldom evolve into formal organizations, and see formality as a menace (ibid.). Thus, informality closes down opportunities, suppresses motivation, discourages freedom and creativity, inhibits and distorts communication; and -as markets expand, the division of labor deepens, and the number, scale and complexity of transactions increase -it becomes less cost effective (Balogh 1966, Bardhan 2002Bauer and Yamey 1963;Olson 1982;Sobel 2002). The only remedy is economic development. The informal will only wither as more comp...

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“…The obvious corollary of this was that the mayoralty reflected the social composition of the aldermen : they ranged from baronets such as Sir Richard Grosvenor (1715) and Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (1736), to shopkeepers including John Parker (1726) and Roger Massey (1734), with little discernible trend over time, except perhaps for the declining importance of merchants. 28 The corporation, and especially the aldermen, comprised a de facto political elite : one with considerable political power. Yet political engagement spread beyond members of the corporation: a significant number of the gentry took one of the numerous administrative roles within the town, especially in the late seventeenth century (Table 1) a Numbers for esquires, gentlemen and aldermen reflect status as given in the probate records.…”

Section: E F I N I N G T H E U R B a N G E N T R Ymentioning

confidence: 99%

Who were the urban gentry? Social elites in an English provincial town, c. 1680–1760

Stobart

2011

Cont. Change

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This paper explores the identity and social worlds of the ‘urban gentry’ of Chester as they developed from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. In place of the political and cultural definitions which characterise analyses of this group, it takes the self-defined ‘occupational’ titles of probate records as a starting point for an investigation into the background and activities of those styling themselves ‘gentleman’. Central to their identity were networks of friendship and trust. These reveal the urban gentry to have been closely tied with both the urban middling sorts and the rural gentry: a position which at once reflected and underpinned their particular situation within eighteenth-century society.

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Personal and commercial networks in an English port: Chester in the early eighteenth century

Cited by 17 publications

References 15 publications

Building Trust in Economic Space

Building Trust in Economic Space

Global South and North: Why Informality Matters

Who were the urban gentry? Social elites in an English provincial town, c. 1680–1760

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