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The Bottom Line

Evan Davis gets to the heart of the big finance stories at The Bottom Line.

A number of years ago, the sociologist Richard Sennett pondered on why it was, that in a so-called digital or virtual age, global financial and business services still crowded into the world’s leading cities. The answer to his question and that of why firms cluster near each other is rooted in the concept of agglomeration economies, of which there are three types:

• Localisation economies: which refer to the advantages accruing to firms in the same activity which result from their joint location;

• Urbanisation economies: which are concerned with the range of advantages to the individual firm which result from the joint location of firms in different and unrelated activities;

• Activity-complex economies: these refer to economies that emerge from the joint location of unalike activities which have substantial trading links with one another. In the case of manufacturing, such economies typically occur within industrial complexes.

 The City of London is a classic example of activity-complex economies at play. Financial firms and associated business services crowd together in the Square Mile and its environs in order to benefit from external and internal economies of scale and scope. Economies of scale that are internal to the firm include spreading a larger output over existing productive capacity, and differentiation of products or services from existing production platforms. External economies of scale and scope include the ability of firms to draw on specialised pools of local labour; and, to exploit different markets because of transport and technology infrastructure. Agglomeration economies are thus at the heart of the dreaded ‘c’ word – clusters – one of the topics of the latest BBC/Open University broadcast of The Bottom Line. The other topic is the future of television.

It’s reasonable to ask, “What on earth has the clustering of firms in the same locale got to do with the future of television?” Well, for many commentators the future of broadcast media is multi-platform. The advantage of multi-platform production, as in any industry, is the ability to exploit external and internal economies of scale and scope; in other words, the capacity to create activity-complex economies. Whether they’re in Euclidean space, cloud computing or cloud cuckoo land makes no difference; clustering concerns the co-location of business activities. The paradox is that in this supposed age of the ‘death of distance’, the dominance of clustering in real geographical space prevails.

The most frequently cited example of a cluster is Silicon Valley in California, the heartland of web-based companies and venture capitalists from where two of the guests of the current programme were drawn. In the 1980s, it was ‘Third Italy’, the region of Emilia Romagna in which small textile firms co-located and gave rise to the Benneton phenomenon, among others. Clusters are nothing new and the academic literature is informed by reference to the work on ‘industrial districts’ of the economist Alfred Marshall, who examined the characteristics of industries in 19th Century England, in particular their locational advantages. The conflating of clusters with industrial districts does a serious disservice to Marshall and his disciples. The celebrity academics and management consultants who have been significantly advantaged by their promotion of an increasingly elastic concept overlook one key fact. Many firms in the same sector are often blithely unaware of the immediate location of competitors, as countless surveys have demonstrated. This is especially true of small and medium sized enterprises: the basis of Marshall’s original ‘industrial districts’. It is the very elasticity of the concept of clusters and the lack of empirical evidence that weakens its claims as the universal panacea for economic development, as the economic geographers, Ron Martin and Peter Sunley perceptively note, “The cluster literature is a patchy constellation of ideas, some of which are important to contemporary economic development some of which are either banal or misleading.” One important issue that’s overlooked in the discussions of clusters is the bounty of nature. London became a global financial centre because its topography allowed it to be become a port; Hollywood initially attracted film makers because of its natural light. Similarly, the bounty of technology has created the television and Internet ages, but what sustains different forms of clusters is their underwriting by the state.

The question of the future of the televisual age is an important one, but one that can lead to debates that are both banal and misleading. Almost since the day John Logie Baird first demonstrated his new device, the television has been the hearth in the home that families cluster around. Whether that connected cluster we commonly know as the Web will change the locale of our emotional and social hearths and heimats is a future question but one that has contemporary resonance. For many, the Internet will replace television as the dominant medium of choice, but as the Chief Executive of the UK-based Channel 5, the other guest of the programme, pointed out, the two are complements and not substitutes. The most ubiquitous contemporary technology is the mobile phone, which has a visual function that allows the user to access television programmes. The Internet and associated technologies may be the medium of transmission but they are not the message.

In the present day, television has become a product and a process that generates its own cluster of activities because technology and social (and business) practices create external and internal economies of scale and scope: a basic condition for the development of clusters. The multi-platform of broadcast media has joined the pantheon of activity-complex economies and agglomeration around a hearth is no longer restricted to family viewing of the Billy Cotton Band Show or Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday evening. In 1979, the Tubes sang “I really love my television” on the track ‘TV is King’ and, like geography, reports of its death have been very premature. Clusters have been around much longer than television but the future of these connected and networked phenomena is still assured as their natural and technological bounties lead us through the millennium.

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The following Open University courses will help you explore these subjects in greater depth:

Managing 1: Organisations and People

Understanding Cities

Understanding Media

Film and Television History

About the author

Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

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Blogging about

The Bottom Line

Evan Davis gets to the heart of the big finance stories at The Bottom Line.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way."

The most well-known passage of Charles Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities, seems an appropriate starting point to discuss private equity, one of the topics of the latest BBC/Open University The Bottom Line broadcast. Belief and incredulity appear to characterise our present epoch of financial booms and crashes, during which private equity firms are painted as the pantomime villain in capitalism’s triumph and fall: asset strippers in name and deed.

The relationship of Dickens’s tale of London and Paris, at the time of the French Revolution, to the financial centre of the City of London seems metaphorical and real. Joseph Addison had described London as an “Emporium for the whole earth” a century earlier, and in the emporium that is the global financial entrepôt of today, private equity firms are as much a part of its landscape as the trader of the 17th century. In the late 20th century, the leitmotif of the City of the furled umbrella and the bowler hat gave way to the yuppie and the mobile phone; the gentleman giving way to the player. For some commentators, these changes represented a revolution whose genesis rested on private equity firms and their ilk.

Businessmen shaking hands.
photo © copyright Jupiterimages Corporation

Private equity firms operate on the basis of buying and selling a portfolio of companies to extract returns of 20 per cent on their investment over a three-to-seven-year period. They institute cost cutting and disposal of parts of companies in order to sweat the assets they have invested in. For defenders of private equity firms, they create long-term value. For critics, they are the manifestation of the UK-based asset strippers of the 1970s; Jim Slater, John Bentley and ‘Tiny’ Rowland amongst others, whose activities were called the “unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism” by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath. The language of private equity activities are, in this view: a climate of fear; downsizing; the casualisation of work and so on. This litany is universal to these firms, whether expressed in the English or any other linguistic form. For the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, entrepreneurship represents the revolutionising of the economic structure which enables new activities to be born, phoenix-like, from the ashes through the process of “creative destruction”.

It is the important question of language that formed the second topic of The Bottom Line discussion. English is claimed to be the universal language of business, with its own cross–national dialects, so that knowledge of other languages is deemed not to be as important as it once was. But language is like football, the rules of the game may be pretty much the same but the variants are as numerous as the array of cities in the world. It is a linguistic truism to say that language affects the way in which one thinks. Knowledge of local customs may be useful upon introduction to a client, but knowledge of the rudiments of the local language is an important part of business engagement and sustainability. For example, in China, saying yes to a question does not signal agreement but rather that the speaker has been heard. These are important considerations for companies that engage in international transactions. It can be argued that globalisation will only be completed if the law of one price operates. That is, all prices in the world converge with the only differences being accounted for by transport and administration costs. Similarly, if English became the first language of everyone in the world it would become truly global.

Capitalism, as Schumpeter and others remind us, is a revolutionary system in which “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” Private equity is part of that system and provides a vehicle for “revolutionising the conditions of production.” A single global language would be part of that revolution, and if that is not generally understood then change does need to be made. Blaming private equity firms and hedge funds for the financial crisis is a bit like Canute blaming the Moon for his failure to control the tides. There are compensations with more than two cities and more than one language in the world which makes us all richer, whether materially or culturally. The globalists, in whatever guise, make us all poorer as heterogeneity is sacrificed for homogeneity.

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About the author

Leslie Budd is Reader in social enterprise at The Open University Business School. He is an economist and has written extensively on the relationship between regional and urban economics, and international financial markets.

Subscribe to Leslie Budd's posts

 

Blogging about

The Bottom Line

Evan Davis gets to the heart of the big finance stories at The Bottom Line.

Does the Internet herald the death of a salesman? Not according to leading retailers like the John Lewis Partnership. Charlie Mayfield, CEO of the partnership, recently said customer service in the store is likely to play a big part in the future success of the business.

Over the last 30 years, there has been a general sense of willingness on behalf of suppliers and customers to develop increasingly close ‘emotional’ relationships based on trust. Buyers reward suppliers with brand loyalty, suppliers in turn develop strategies to energise this ‘connective’ relationship.

Until the Internet became a commercial tool, relationships were developed personally through sales representatives and customer service staff. As customers and suppliers become increasingly physically connected to one another via the Internet, the big issue is whether the nature of the relationship is changing as a result of transactions taking place online.

Technology companies have eagerly taken on the challenge to create digital solutions which can replace human interaction. Recently, Skymol has launched new software to add the human touch in a virtual world where customers can expect to engage in live voice and video chat to aid their purchasing decision. In other words, businesses can do personal selling online.

However, digital sales personnel are nothing new. In 2001 LifeFX created business avatars to help make customers feel more ‘at home’ when using the Internet to purchase goods and services. The company added a human face to standard email communications but it never became a mainstream business application.

Perhaps the heart of the question lies in whether online sales are based on short term transactional relationships, like those in the 1960 and 70’s, whereby sales personnel were concerned about making the one-off sales. Or alternatively, whether they’re based on longer-term close connective relationships.

Relationship marketing was a fundamental shift in the philosophy of the organisation, which rapidly grew in the 1980. It’s based on the fundamental premise that it’s important to develop ongoing relationships with a customer by focusing on quality, marketing, and customer service.

At the turn of this century prophets of doom suggested the internet would annihilate existing business methodologies and professions. Indeed, leading retail consultants predicted the demise of the high street in late 1990 as a result of online selling via the Internet. However, as we approach the end of the 00s, personal selling is still very important to many businesses. Whilst Internet sales continue to grow, and in some sectors account for a significant proportion of sales, this is not the case for all businesses and for the time being at least the high street remains with us.

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