The Good Oil * by Rod Brown
You spend a few days or hours in a city, or a country town, and you can feel the buzz – in other words, it’s a go ahead, confident place, where people and companies really connect and share common values. I suspect a locality’s buzz ebbs and flows, and that it affects people differently. I can feel it in cities like New York, London, Melbourne and San Francisco, and in regional locales like Cairns, the Barossa Valley and the Gold Coast. Anyway, some interesting research has surfaced to help us understand the buzz feeling.
The Rise of Soft Capitalism (N. Thrift, Routledge, London) explains that ‘soft capital, though global in capital, will be strongly oriented to the local’. He says that a crucial facet of tacit knowledge is that it tends to be spatially rooted and localised, largely because it is driven by personal interaction and community structure. Thrift defines ‘tacit knowledge’ by reference to Polyanyi’s (1967) elegant words ‘we can know more than we tell’. In other words, the more an enterprise is dependent on intellectual insight, the more it craves the streams and networks of tacit knowledge. This is a powerful concept in explaining the relentless concentration of advanced business services in relatively few places. A complementary piece comes from Storper and Venabels, Buzz: Face to Face Contact and the Urban Economy: 2002, suggesting that face to face (F2F) contact provides agglomerating firms with major competitive advantages.
They argue that F2F is a highly efficient technology of communication not possible through remote transmission.
As a result, in some cities and sectors (fashion, design, culture, finance), the advantages of F2F communication is multiplied through informal and planned networks, and a ‘buzz’ develops.
‘Buzz’ is more than the circulation of information in F2F networks. It results from the externalities of F2F processes. Buzz allows people in and around networks to know what is happening – it socialises individuals to allow them to signal so that others will admit them to intentional face to face contacts. And it attracts individuals to places where they are likely to pick up on these signals. Thanks to our friends at Spiller, Gibbins & Swan for bringing these nuggets to our attention.
Subsidies don’t always lead to mediocrity
Peter Fitzsimons, the ex Wallaby, writes an entertaining column in the Sydney Morning Herald. Peter attended the Premier’s Literary Awards dinner recently, where Geoffrey Atherden (the brains behind the ‘Mother and Son’ TV show) delivered a riveting and well received keynote address. Peter said Atherden’s speech finished thus:
“I’d like to end on a final note of gloom. I was at a roundtable discussion on the film industry at Macquarie Bank last year and the last speaker said that he’d like to see an end to all forms of support and subsidy for the film industry, because subsidy only leads to mediocrity. I have a one word response to that argument. Sport. Australia gives more support to our athletes per head than any other country in the world and that is why we do so outstandingly well in the Olympics. Australia has an enviable international reputation in sport.
“Imagine if we kept all of that sporting reputation … but imagine if as well as that, we were known for being intelligent, creative, informed, interesting and thoughtful – for being world leaders in innovation and the creative industries. People would want to get to know us, they’d want to visit us, they’d want to do business with us.
“Imagine if we had an environment of artistic and cultural activity here that was so stimulating and exciting that people would want to come and work here, and all those talented young Australians would come flooding back.” (There are a reported 500,000 Australians living in London at any one time!)
Inefficient energy efficient globes
Readers might recall that a few months back we queried how the Feds would actually enforce a ban on the standard light globe. Mayor of Junee Shire Council, Councillor Lola Cummins, has written in, adding a further dimension!
“Earlier this year we had a series of ‘brown outs’ and every energy efficient light globe in the house blew. I mentioned this to one of our local electricians who had read an article (I assume in a trade publication) about the globes. He said someone had pulled one apart and worked out that to make all the components takes more greenhouse gas emissions than that generated by ‘ordinary’ globes. How energy efficient is that?
“My big gripe also is that it is very hard to see to read using the energy efficient globes.”
Yes, Minister
Access to the Federal Government is the tightest in living memory – accessing grants, getting a hearing, influencing a decision. The disgraceful treatment of Customs whistleblower Allan Kessing, regarding aviation security, is yet another example of the control system in place. The vast majority of bureaucrats would privately agree that things are out of kilter.
I won’t dwell on this now, but in meantime I suggest that:
- the most accessible grants for companies in your locality are the commercial ready, global opportunities and food programs• the most accessible grants for local Councils probably involve the Water Fund, Auslink, the Regional Development Program and the plethora of piddling community services programs. If you don’t have the patience or humour, contact us.
- Articles in the Good Oil column are provided by members of the Cockatoo network – an international group of individuals and organisations that collaborate on industry and regional issues. Contact apd@orac.net.au for membership details.
