Emerging Clusters: The Importance Of Legitimacy, Path Advocates, And Narratives

How new industrial pathways of development evolve has captured much attention in evolutionary economic geography lately. The role of path advocates and their narratives is deemed integral to legitimizing new industrial and technological pathways in regions. This paper investigates how the increasingly popular concept of legitimacy can shed light on the emergence of the London and Singapore software clusters. It finds that multiple concurrent clusters were emerging in these cities, the legitimization of which shaped the present-day clusters. The paper provides a novel rethinking of the cluster emergence process using a legitimacy perspective that highlights the varied importance of normative, cognitive, and regulatory legitimacies and the scales they emerge at, and contributes to understandings of inter-path dynamics and the role of path advocates and their narratives.