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European Planning Studies
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Emerging clusters: the importance of legitimacy,
path advocates, and narratives
Jack Laurie Harris
To cite this article: Jack Laurie Harris (2021) Emerging clusters: the importance of
legitimacy, path advocates, and narratives, European Planning Studies, 29:5, 942-961, DOI:
10.1080/09654313.2020.1817864
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Emerging clusters: the importance of legitimacy, path
advocates, and narratives
Jack Laurie Harris
Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
ABSTRACT
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.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 26 September 2019
Revised 12 August 2020
Accepted 17 August 2020
KEYWORDS
Legitimacy; narratives; path
advocates; clusters; economic
geography; cluster
emergence
1. Introduction
The last decade has seen a growing evolutionary economic geography (EEG), galvanized
by the import of new concepts from the broader social sciences and beyond (Martin and
Sunley 2015). The value of such imported concepts is clear to see in the emerging litera-
ture, with the path creation or new path development literature garnering particularly
energetic debates as of late (Hassink, Isaksen, and Trippl 2019; Mackinnon et al. 2019).
As this literature grows, additional concepts are being incorporated which aim to
provide further rigour, such as that of legitimacy from the transition studies literature
(Murphy 2015). This paper finds that an application of the legitimacy concept to clusters
presents important findings for how new clusters emerge. How actors position their nar-
ratives, particularly at what geographic scales, is integral to generating the normative, cog-
nitive, and regulatory legitimacies that are needed for cluster emergence, and thus provides
key insights to the role of actors in cluster evolution and new path development.
New path development has been defined as ‘the emergence and growth of new indus-
tries and economic activities in regions’(Mackinnon et al. 2019, 3). While such ‘economic
activities’is inclusionary of clusters, the literature has typically conflated any such cluster
emergence as synonymous with industry emergence in a region. This focus on the regional
scale misses important spatial factors and variations. Clusters, industries, and regions are
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Jack Laurie Harris j.l.harris@soton.ac.uk
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES
2021, VOL. 29, NO. 5, 942–961
https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2020.1817864
directly implicated through co-evolutionary dynamics; indeed, following Martin and
Sunley (2015), all can be seen as overlapping and interconnected complex systems.
While the focus of a regional complex system and its industrial path is activities occurring
within the territorially defined area, a cluster complex system is concerned with the pro-
duction of externalities through clustering of related firms and the reflexive effects of these
externalities on said firms (Martin and Sunley 2015). These externalities are the sub-
sequent benefits accrued by firms because of their interactions within the cluster and
can take the form of knowledge spillovers, increased collaboration on R&D, supplier lin-
kages, and beneficial supplies of labour, capital, or other resources, amongst others. Such a
complex systems approach takes a relational view of clusters and sees them as dynamic
entities capable of existing within and across broader regional boundaries, rather than
singular and fixed at territorial scales, such as the region (Martin and Sunley 2011). Perti-
nently, this understanding facilitates the possibility for there to be multiple clusters within
a region, each offering their own set of beneficial externalities to the firms located there.
The cluster term covers an array of concepts aimed at understanding the benefits of co-
location, each with slightly different properties. For instance, clusters may be more Porter-
ian in nature, consisting of geographic concentrations of interconnected companies across
interrelated industries (Porter 1998); or, they may be more specialized, single-industry
agglomerations; but the focus here remains on the way in which the system of interrelated
firms produce and benefit from externalities. By exploring the emergence of clusters, it
provides a more nuanced understanding of the role of space and externalities within
the region, and potentially the inter-path relations of clusters, regions and industries
(Hassink, Isaksen, and Trippl 2019).
The cluster evolution literature has somewhat stagnated and while recent debates
around cluster emergence have attracted some attention (see, for example: Li 2018),
‘more knowledge about how new clusters emerge and why clusters grow in particular
places is needed’(Isaksen 2016, 704). Cluster emergence is an integral stage of cluster evol-
ution to understand as path dependence theory dictates that the way a cluster emerges will
have important implications for the evolutionary trajectory of the cluster (Harris 2020;
Martin and Sunley 2011). While small, the cluster emergence literature has produced
three main explanations over time for how cluster emergence happens. Firstly, out of
random chance or serendipity; secondly, out of the existing characteristics and capabilities
of the locality or region in a path-dependent manner; thirdly, and more recently, an actor-
centred perspective has been offered which sees existing characteristics and capabilities as
preconditions that require actor-led ‘triggering factors’for cluster emergence to occur
(Isaksen 2016). However, despite this progress, the cluster emergence literature has seen
little integration with some of the more recent concepts imported into EEG.
In transition studies, legitimacy is used to understand the process of how niche tech-
nologies become adopted in the socio-technical landscape (Murphy 2015). Recently, econ-
omic geographers have begun to use the concept of legitimacy to understand how new
industry pathways transition from limited niches to significant regional industries
(Binz, Truffer, and Coenen 2016;Boschma et al. 2017; Steen and Hansen 2018). Legiti-
macy is the consonance of an entity with a socially constructed set of norms, values,
beliefs and practices, and is garnered through cognitive, normative, or regulatory means
(Murphy 2015). Important within this is how actors can construct (anti)narratives
about the new entity to accrue the necessary social support, ensuring that the new
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 943
technology or industry becomes socially accepted (Garud, Kumaraswamy, and Karnøe
2010). Others have highlighted how this requires more than simply mobilizing existing
preconditions and justifying them through path-dependent reasons, but instead actors
must sell the future that this new technology or industry offers (Steen and Hansen
2018). The focus on how emerging entities become accepted into broader socio-economic
environments due to actor behaviour makes it an ideal concept to apply to clusters, which
do not emerge due to random chance or serendipity, but because of (un)intentional actor
behaviour (Isaksen 2016).
This paper explores the emergence of what are now the London and Singapore software
clusters. While the spatial extent of these clusters now encompasses much of these cities,
their emergence can be traced to multiple instances of offices and specific neighbourhoods
at various locations throughout the two cities: three in London and two in Singapore. The
following section will explore the literature on legitimacy in economic geography, concep-
tualizing how cluster emergence may occur through a legitimacy perspective. Following a
brief section justifying the methods and case studies used, the paper will utilize the con-
cepts of normative, cognitive, and regulatory legitimacy to understand how these emerging
clusters shaped their inter-path dynamics and the evolution of the present-day London
and Singapore software clusters in a detailed empirical documentation of the two clusters.
Section five will discuss the main findings offered by this perspective on cluster emergence,
before some concluding comments.
2. Legitimizing cluster emergence
The concept of legitimacy has been used in the transition studies literature to explain the
process by which new, niche, technologies become accepted into the existing sociotechni-
cal landscape after gaining legitimacy from actors who then begin to use the technology
(Murphy 2015). Such sociotechnical landscapes are ‘coherent complex[es] of scientific
knowledge, engineering practices, production process technologies, product character-
istics, skills and procedures, established user needs, regulatory requirements, institutions
and infrastructures’(Rip and Kemp 1998, 338). In contrast, niches are spaces where inno-
vative new technologies that are typically radical in nature are emerging. This emergence
will soon falter, however, if the new technology is not legitimized and accepted in the land-
scape. However, it is often a long and complex process of legitimization that facilitates it.
In transition studies, legitimization is required to overcome any risks, liabilities, pre-
conceptions, or unfamiliarity that is associated with a niche technology. Legitimacy
comes in three types of legitimacy: ‘normative’uses of it within society, ‘cognitive’aware-
ness and understandings of the technology, or its ‘regulatory’compliance with specific
rules or presence in policy-making (Markand, Raven, and Truffer 2012). Legitimacy
accrues by creating narratives to convey the benefits of the new technology, while at the
same time combating any anti-narratives put forward to suppress the niche (Garud,
Kumaraswamy, and Karnøe 2010). Narratives are purveyed by believers in the new tech-
nology, while conversely, anti-narratives come from advocates for the existing dominant
technology who attempt to argue otherwise about the potential for the new technology to
replace theirs (Garud, Kumaraswamy, and Karnøe 2010). A current example is the conflict
between the renewable and non-renewable energy industries. It is these actors and their
strategies that will decide whether a niche technology gains legitimacy.
944 J. L. HARRIS
However, while the transitions studies literature uses the concept in reference to tech-
nologies, legitimacy can imbue different kinds of entities beyond technologies. Because of
this, EEG scholars have begun to apply legitimacy to the emergence of new industrial path-
ways in regions. Binz, Truffer, and Coenen (2016) suggest that niche industrial pathways
can be legitimized in regions through processes such as constructing markets, procuring
investment, changing institutions, and spreading knowledge. This is necessary because
the present regulatory or knowledge frameworks are not always conducive to the emer-
gence of new pathways, nor is there plentiful investment or market opportunities for
the industry to operate with (Dewald and Truffer 2012). Rather, the existing industries
in the region are likely to be utilizing or blocking resources from actors in these niche
industries. Mobilizing these resources will depend on the work of a range of actors. For
example, entrepreneurs, investors and intermediaries must work together to generate
investments, or indeed change the regulatory framework to encourage such investments.
Other regulations may be changed, and markets created, by actors capable of lobbying for
such changes. Importantly, from a geographical perspective, key actors and resources in
this process need not always come from within the region but can have extra-local
origins (Binz, Truffer, and Coenen 2016). This makes the creation of new pathways of
industrial development in regions a contested and geographical process.
The legitimacy concept has seen very limited application to clusters. The notable excep-
tion is Emmoth, Persson, and Lundberg’s(2015) investigation into the role of interpartner
legitimacy in creating and developing cluster initiatives. They found that interpartner
legitimacy is integral to generating effective shared goals in a new cluster initiative, high-
lighting the difficulty of bridging gaps between the various actors involved which each
have different ideals, and pointing to the importance of both internal and external legit-
imacies in garnering interest in the cluster initiative. However, such top-down cluster
initiatives represent only a minority of emerging clusters, and this paper aims to
produce a more holistic understanding of legitimacy’s role in the emergence of clusters
more broadly.
The concept of legitimacy, then, has been used to understand how novel entities, such
as technologies, organizations, or industries, become accepted into socio-economic land-
scapes due to the (anti)narratives constructed by advocates. This focus on how actors
engender legitimacy to an entity suggests it can be applied to the process by which new
clusters emerge and the role of actors within that process. The current understanding
of cluster emergence in the literature is that clusters have emerged once co-locations of
firms are actively engaging and benefiting from some externalities, and that this occurs
due to the ability of actors to utilize pre-conditions in favourable ways to generate the
externalities (Isaksen 2016). However, this understanding has two limitations that the
legitimacy concept can improve. Firstly, clusters are often considered in isolation from
the socio-economic landscape (Martin and Sunley 2015). We know that cluster evolution
can be driven by changes in industry, technology, product, or other cluster life-cycles, and
that firm dynamics are imperative to cluster heterogeneity and avoiding negative lock-in’s
(Menzel and Fornahl 2010). Thus, it may be fruitful to have a perspective that explores
both the emergence of externalities and the engagement of the emerging cluster with
broader socio-economic landscapes.
Secondly, there is little appreciation of clusters as social constructs. Understanding the
relationship between emerging clusters and broader socio-economic landscapes is as much
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 945
based on the tangible qualities of the new economic phenomena as it is the (anti)narratives
constructed by advocates. Clusters as social constructs has been a long-standing issue in
the cluster literature but one that has received little attention. The concept was introduced
by Michael Porter (1998) and marketed as a way for government policy makers to secure
economic growth in regional economies by encouraging the natural tendency of firms to
co-locate and share externalities. Couched in accessible business language, the concept
exploded in popularity as Porter led a research programme aimed at identifying clusters
throughout the U.S. and promoting their growth through policies. Policy makers have
often used cluster policies to announce the presence of clusters, only to see the supposed
cluster perform poorly with little or no cluster externalities (Lovering 1999). This led to
Martin and Sunley (2003) questioning whether clusters were more marketing concepts
and social constructs than actual economic phenomena. Recently, some have argued for
a revisiting of such issues through an engagement with the place-branding literature
(Nathan and Vandore 2019). A popular literature in urban and cultural geographies, it
is argued that the idea of branding could be applied to understand how actors drive
cluster evolution.
The legitimacy concept, with its focus on how novel entities are legitimized in broader
socio-economic landscapes through actor constructed (anti)narratives, thus offers a way to
expand upon the current limited definition of cluster emergence and add a much needed
socially constructed element to our understanding. For emerging clusters, then, how can
the concept of legitimacy be applied (Table 1)? Firstly, rather than focusing on the specific
socio-technical landscape used in transitions studies, the focus should be on the broader
socio-economic landscapes. The global socio-economic landscape is highly variegated
with various states, regions, or clusters having particular advantages when it comes to
certain industries or products. These advantages affect the locational behaviour of firms;
for example, technology firms flock from across the world to (re)locate in Silicon Valley
for its labour and knowledge pools. This variegated economic landscape is constantly evol-
ving and competing, however, as industries and clusters rise and fall in various places.
Indeed, Silicon Valley became the world leader in semi-conductor production in part
Table 1. Summary of concepts applied in this paper.
Concept Use in the transition studies literature Applied to clusters
Landscapes Socio-technical landscapes contain dominant
technologies
The socio-economic landscape of industries and
clusters with particular specialisms in industries or
products
Niches Protected spaces where innovative new
technologies are emerging
Emerging clusters that are not yet recognized in the
existing socio-economic ‘landscape’
Advocates Convey the benefits of the new technology,
while combating any antinarratives
suppressing the niche
Cluster advocates are those actors (un)intentionally
promoting a cluster
Narratives Created and used by technology advocates to
legitimize the technology
Created and used by cluster advocates to legitimize
the cluster
Normative
legitimacy
‘Normative’uses of the technology within
society
Secured when actors are undertaking and benefiting
from activities that produce cluster externalities on
a daily basis
Cognitive
legitimacy
‘Cognitive’awareness and understandings of
the technology
Occurs when actors in the socio-economic landscape
become aware of the emerging cluster
Regulatory
legitimacy
‘Regulatory’compliance of the technology with
specific rules or policies
The recognition of the cluster in the formal rules and
policies of the government
Source: Author’s own.
946 J. L. HARRIS
because of out-competing the Boston Route 128 cluster, which saw a decline in response
(Saxenian 1994).
Emerging clusters, then, are the ‘niches’that are not yet recognized in the existing
socio-economic ‘landscape’. The current understanding of cluster emergence is rather
binary: the presence of externalities and firms in a location indicates a cluster, while no
externalities means no cluster; thus, a cluster is considered fully emerged once externalities
are present. However, this understanding ignores how clusters are socially constructed
through narratives and assumes actors have a perfect knowledge of their presence;
having externalities does not necessarily mean that actors in the broader socio-economic
landscape are aware of them, and thus are unable to engage with the emerging cluster. Just
as a technology needs users, policy-makers, and technology advocates to construct narra-
tives that ensure it becomes widely adopted in the technology landscape, so too do clusters
to ensure that firms are aware of the possibility to (re)locate there. Thus, any understand-
ing of cluster emergence must take a process-oriented understanding of how clusters
become legitimized in the broader socio-economic landscape. Policy-makers have long
attempted to sell the advantages of their clusters over other competitor clusters, but
firms too could find themselves as cluster advocates lobbying for the benefits that locating
in a specific cluster may bring if it will also benefit them. Such advocates may bring about
the legitimacy of a cluster through the interaction of the three types of legitimacy: norma-
tive, cognitive, and regulatory, that can all be applied to our understanding of clusters.
In the technology-oriented understandings of legitimacy, ‘normative’legitimacy occurs
when practitioners adopt the regular use of the technology. For cluster emergence, then,
‘normative’legitimacy is secured when actors within the clusters are regularly undertak-
ing, and benefiting from, activities that produce externalities. It may be that firms are ben-
efiting from knowledge spillovers, networking, or any other externality-producing
behaviour, but it is these behaviours that provide externalities and differentiate a cluster
from a simple co-location of firms. In that sense, the existing binary understanding of
cluster emergence in the literature is akin to whether or not actors have generated norma-
tive legitimacy and thus cluster externalities. However, in the process of cluster emergence,
normative legitimacy alone is insufficient for a cluster to be fully emerged, nor is it necess-
arily the first type of legitimacy to occur.
‘Cognitive’legitimacy in the transition studies literature occurs when actors in the
broader landscape become aware of the benefits of an emerging, niche, technology,
because of technology advocate narratives. Once this cognitive legitimacy has spread
awareness, actors in the broader landscape are likely to embrace the technology. This
can be applied directly to clusters. For an emerging cluster, cognitive legitimacy occurs
when narratives have made actors in the broader socio-economic landscape aware of a
potential cluster. This is important because while firms in the socio-economic landscape
may want to benefit from a cluster’s externalities, they cannot relocate if they are unaware
of the clusters’presence. Thus, the normative legitimacy of an emerging cluster may
provide externalities to local actors that mean it is an emerging cluster, but it will not
attract other firms until it has a cognitive legitimacy in the socio-technical landscape
that has made external actors aware of its presence. Thus, through this perspective, a
cluster cannot yet be considered fully ‘emerged’if actors outside the cluster are
unaware of it; rather, it is still ‘emerging’. Of course, the narratives about the emerging
cluster are particularly important, as they will dictate whether external actors wish to
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 947
locate in the emerging cluster or not. Furthermore, cognitive legitimacy is something that
will evolve overtime as more actors become aware from different places; however, at the
most basic level, cognitive legitimacy occurs when some relevant firms become aware of
the benefits found in a particular location, as they are the actors most important to
ongoing cluster evolution.
Lastly, ‘regulatory’legitimacy comes from the recognition of the technology in the
formal rules and policies of the government, which can also be applied directly to clusters.
As the cluster concept was originally designed as a policy tool to encourage firms to co-
locate and share externalities (Porter 1998), clusters have often been represented by
policy makers in the regulatory domain (Lovering 1999). Policies have been used to
create new government-led clusters entirely, and to increase the number of firms and
externalities found in existing clusters, with varying success. For example, governments
can launch generous funding policies that can attract firms to a particular location, in
the hope that their arrival will create either an entirely new cluster or increase the avail-
ability of externalities in an emerging cluster, or they can create top-down cluster initiat-
ives. As Emmoth, Persson, and Lundberg (2015) have shown, however, cluster initiatives
must be legitimized by other actors to have a chance at success. In that regard, changes in
the regulatory legitimization of a cluster may, or may not, have implications for the emer-
gence of a cluster and is an important factor to consider.
The aim of this paper, then, is to understand how cluster advocates can precipitate
cluster emergence by creating narratives that instil the cluster with normative, cognitive,
or regulatory legitimacies. The case studies offered here provide examples of cluster advo-
cates and their narratives, as well as the varying importance of all three types of legitimacy
in the process of cluster emergence. First, however, the methodology will be discussed.
3. Methods and case study background
The data used in this research was gathered during a research project on the evolution of
the London and Singapore software clusters between 2006 and 2018, the primary data col-
lection for which took place largely between September 2017 and September 2018. As this
research was evolutionary in nature, a follow-the-path methodology was undertaken,
which involves identifying aspects of the chosen cluster and tracing their origins and
effects up and down the evolution of the cluster (Pike et al. 2016). Doing so provides
an overview of the clusters’evolution, from the drivers of the initial cluster emergence,
through to the factors that enable the cluster to exist in its present state, as well as acknowl-
edging aspects of path change or failure that were present. Because of the difficulty in per-
forming this kind of historical research, including scarcity or difficulty in attaining
respondents from historical periods, the research uses an iterative mixed-methods
approach to ensure that the data collected is maximized and triangulated for verification
(Pike et al. 2016).
Initially, an array of secondary data sources, such as secondary interviews, blogs, news
articles, and other archival materials, were used for the preliminary data needed to provide
entry-points to the cluster pathway, which could be followed to secure the bigger evol-
utionary picture. Given the historical nature of the research, these archival materials
were vital to provide accurate snapshots of cluster activities at certain periods throughout
cluster emergence, when other sources were not readily available. These secondary sources
948 J. L. HARRIS
were particularly useful in providing the preliminary information required to identify
paths of investigation, respondents to interview, and follow-up questions to verify the
data and empirical story of evolution. While these data sources may have issues of
reliability on their own, a suite of 100 formal and informal interviews were used to trian-
gulate the data they supplied. These interviews were with actors, evenly split, within the
London and Singapore clusters (Table 2). Respondents represented the range of actors
found in software clusters, with policy makers, venture capitalists, accelerators, angel
investors, startups, and scaleups all represented in the interviews (Tables 3 and 4).
Together, secondary and primary sources of data were iteratively compared to provide
insights into what future data needed to be collected and how to secure it, until eventually
the holistic view of the cluster pathways needed was acquired.
For this paper, however, not all respondents could comment on the emergence phase
because of the small pool of respondents that were actually present during the years of
2006–2010 when both clusters emerged. Approximately 20 interviews were with respon-
dents who had first-hand experience of the cluster emergence process, while the others
provided contextual information about the broader evolutionary trajectories, such as
second-hand stories that took place during the emergence period or how the cluster has
evolved since which facilitated an understanding of the varied success of happenings
during the emergence phase. Used reflexively, the secondary data sources and primary
interviews constructed an accurate understanding of cluster emergence, and consequently,
the empirical sources used in the following sections come from both primary and second-
ary data sources.
The London and Singapore case studies were selected because of notable similarities in
their evolutionary trajectories. As of 2019, the London and Singapore software clusters
were ranked third and fourteenth globally, making them the biggest European and
Asian software clusters (outside of China), with total valuations of $47bn and $25bn, com-
pared to the global average of $5bn (StartupGenome 2019). As well as their status as
Table 2. Breakdown of primary interviews undertaken by actor type.
Case Software entrepreneurs Accelerator and community actors Investors Government actors
London 32 12 7 7
Singapore 35 10 9 3
Source: Author’s own.
Table 3. Breakdown of all interviews by startup stage.
Case Total interviews Early-stage Mid-stage Late-stage
London 32 10 15 7
Singapore 35 20 11 4
Source: Author’s own.
Table 4. Breakdown of all interviews by investor type.
Case Total interviews Early-stage Mid-stage Late-stage
London 7 5 1 1
Singapore 9 5 3 1
Source: Author’s own.
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 949
leading clusters in their respective regions, their emergence can also be traced to roughly
the same time, around 2006. However, they also offer an interesting contrast in the way in
which they emerged. As this paper will demonstrate in the following section, the London
case emerged organically as a consequence of action taken by notable entrepreneurs, while
the Singapore case originated from the decisions of government actors. This presented the
opportunity to analyse the different roles of actors as cluster advocates in the process of
cluster emergence. The following sections will explore the contrasting emergence of
these clusters, tracing how different cluster advocates and their narratives provided the
clusters with the legitimacy necessary to emerge.
4. The emergence of the London software cluster
The context for the emergence of both clusters was the changing nature of the software
industry, which, around 2006, was spawning technological innovations that were facil-
itating the emergence of new software startups. These technological innovations,
coming predominantly out of Silicon Valley, such as web tools from Google and
social media from Twitter and Facebook, as well as Amazon cloud computing web ser-
vices in Seattle, set the context for the software industry globally. Key innovations like
these meant that
with the economy of scale of cloud services coming online late 2007, 2006, you really start[ed]
having the context in which startups can start testing things out cheaply, see if there’s a cus-
tomer base, and then scale it if there is one. On that basis, you started seeing a whole bunch of
startups popping up. (Investor 1)
Shoreditch in 2006 was an old industrial and fairly run-down part of London, but with a
history of creativity and entrepreneurship dating back to the 1980s because of the cheap
rents, industrial vibe, and an abundance of office space (Entrepreneur 1; 3), as well as being
the home of the DotCom boom and bust period. What was once bustling with startups was
now largely vacant as entrepreneurs dispersed. It was this supply of creativity and office
space that some keen entrepreneurs who saw the potential offered by these new technol-
ogies, sought to exploit (Accelerator Director 1; Entrepreneur 1).
Aware of the benefits of clustering from the success of Silicon Valley, it was the inten-
tion of these entrepreneurs to form a small community of software startups in Shoreditch
that would provide mutual benefits to those located there (Entrepreneur 2). These entre-
preneurs now have the reputation as ‘the notable founders’(Entrepreneur 4; 5) and were
the first cluster advocates. They had identified what would soon be the burgeoning hub of
the area as a building colloquially known as ‘The Shit Office’, located on the Old Street
Roundabout in Shoreditch. While the cost of renting office space in the Soho area of
London was approximately £55 per sq ft, this building was as low as £2.50 per sq ft, as
it was scheduled for demolition (Hoye 2015).
These entrepreneurs made up the original tenants located in this building, having
recently formed MOO and Dopplr, amongst others. As cluster advocates, they began to
construct a narrative that there were benefits to be had by clustering in this building:
Around 2006, 2007 was when I started to hear noise amongst my friends, and they started
telling me I should get involved and come and share an office with them. (Entrepeneur 2)
950 J. L. HARRIS
The ‘notable founders’were advocating for a place where software startups could locate
in close proximity, which would provide the opportunity for the actors to help each other
for mutual benefit, and was facilitated by sharing cheap office space. As firms began to
embrace this narrative, relocating to the shared office space and engaging in the mutually
beneficial behaviours that produced these externalities, the cluster gained normative legiti-
macy as the regular shared behaviours that produce externalities now made the co-
location of firms a cluster:
The beginning of 2008 was a really exciting time to be an entrepreneur in London because
there wasn’t the support structures there are now, so we really depended on each other …
it was a very vibrant and exciting time despite it being smaller than it is now. (Navarro 2015)
The externalities arose because actors shared their knowledge about running software
startups, securing local investors, findings new hires, improving each other’s business
models, as well as sharing costs such as equipment and rent (Entrepreneur 1; 2; 4). Par-
ticularly, one respondent noted that they hired two employees based on the recommen-
dation of another firm located in the building (Entrepreneur 2), while another received
investment after being introduced to the investor of the firm they shared office space
with (Entrepreneur 4).
Shortly after experiencing the benefits of locating in the emerging cluster and sharing in
the production of externalities, these entrepreneurs in turn attracted their own friends. For
instance, the founder of Skimlinks, a publishing software startup, moved to Shoreditch
after their mentor had moved themselves (Navarro 2015). They wanted both the cheap
space and to be around people who could help them launch their company:
We have been blessed with free office space and financial and operational support, along with
a few other start-ups, by our incredible supporters. The rest of the building is full of more
established companies …which lets them have a floor of companies they support …This
support –both financial, operational and inspirational –is the reason Skimlinks has been
able to grow. (Navarro 2008)
After Skimlinks had followed their mentor, they in turn attracted their angel investor to
the area by adopting the narrative (Hoye 2015), becoming an advocate for the cluster
themselves.
The emergence of cluster externalities, then, was not simply because of the availability
of cheap rents or other existing conditions but because cluster advocates created a narra-
tive that utilized these preconditions to attract other firms to the area on the promise that
externalities and a mutually beneficial community would arise if they normatively legiti-
mized the narrative. As these actors interacted on a daily basis, they imbued the emerging
cluster with normative legitimacy, embracing the narrative and creating the mutually ben-
eficial externalities necessary for the co-location of firms to be considered a cluster.
While normative legitimacy was present, as the original cluster advocates and those that
they had invited to relocate were benefiting from cluster externalities, the broader software
and startup communities outside of the local area were unaware of the emerging cluster’s
presence. In articles posted at the preeminent U.K. technology blog at the time, technology
journalist Mike Butcher had been promoting the narrative of a ‘Digital Hub for the UK’
after visiting Dublin’s‘Digital Hub’(Butcher 2008a). One post was titled ‘Starting the cam-
paign for The Tech Hub’, which suggested a ‘TechHub’building be created as a catalyst for
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 951
developing startups. However, in suggesting London as a location for this hub, it high-
lighted the lack of knowledge regarded the emerging Shoreditch cluster:
I’m thinking that one of the buildings in the plans for the London Olympics would be good
for this Tech Hub, or perhaps it could be near Canary Wharf or in the East End of London?
Perhaps there is already an existing project that can be expanded? Kings Cross might be the
ideal area –loads of new development, access to the Heathrow Express and Eurostar.
(Butcher 2008a)
Butcher was not the only advocate for a London cluster. In a 2007 blog post lamenting
the brain drain to Silicon Valley, Saul Klein, partner of Index Ventures in London, also
produced the narrative that a London cluster was needed, and announced the intention
to host a week-long competition for European startups to attract venture capital in
London, named Seedcamp week (Klein 2007). Indeed, of the 54 comments on Saul
Klein’s blogpost, none mentioned what was emerging in Shoreditch, rather, one suggested
that ‘London is [missing] the cheap, do-what-you-want-with-it garage space which was so
important to HP, Apple and Google!’(Meme chose 2007). This demonstrates that while
there was an emerging cluster in Shoreditch, actors across London were unaware. In
short, there was no cognitive legitimacy of the emerging cluster in the broader socio-econ-
omic landscape.
It was not until the summer of 2008 that a new narrative was produced that provided
the cognitive legitimacy that made the emerging Shoreditch software cluster common
knowledge. This moment happened in July 2008, during MOO’s summer party, when
much of the conversation was centred on how beneficial moving into this shared office
space had been for the firms, the types of benefits they were receiving, and what direction
the cluster would be moving in (Entrepreneur 4). In response, one entrepreneur sarcasti-
cally coined the term ‘Silicon Roundabout’, in reference to Silicon Valley and after the ugly
Old Street roundabout that ‘The Shit Office’was centred on (Entrepreneur 4). Tim Brad-
shaw, technology journalist for the Financial Times happened to be attendance and
immediately published an article on this new name and what it represented (Bradshaw
2008), while it also made the front page of the Evening Standard (Evening Standard 2008).
News quickly spread to Mike Butcher, who released an article on the cluster and
enclosed a map of the Silicon Roundabout (Butcher 2008b), which meant that it soon
become common knowledge for anyone in the London software industry and beyond. Fol-
lowing the discovery of Silicon Roundabout, Butcher (2008c) went on to state that:
talk of a ‘TechHub’now seemed rather a ‘top down’, imposed concept. Clearly there was a
large organic hub …forming in …Shoreditch. This makes a lot of sense …Who needs
someone banging on about socially engineering a cluster when one is actually forming?
Just sit back and watch it grow.
In asserting that there was a growing cluster in Shoreditch, the narrative was created
that the ‘Silicon Roundabout’was the software cluster that various actors had been
looking for in London. Given the audience of TechCrunch and the other journalistic pub-
lications, it gave the Shoreditch cluster a cognitive legitimacy where actors across the
socio-economic landscape became aware of the cluster. It was after this that firms
began relocating to the area in significant amounts. In 2010, at the time the Silicon Round-
about narrative was launched, it was estimated that there were approximately 85 software
firms in the cluster, a number that quickly swelled to at least 200 in 2011.
952 J. L. HARRIS
However, it was not until after these articles cognitively legitimizing Silicon Round-
about that it was discovered that other nascent software clusters had been emerging in
London. Prompted by an article titled ‘Now we have Silicon Roundabout –where else
are London’s existing, organic tech hubs?’, it became apparent that at least two other emer-
ging software clusters were present in London (Butcher 2008b,2008c). Hammersmith and
London Bridge were cited as places that had externalities during this period (Entrepreneur
1; 3; 4; 7; 9). London Bridge, for example, was anchored by Huddle, a major software
startup. They shared their office building with six other startups, including the incoming
three winners of the Seedcamp week, which demonstrates that these firms shared funding
networks as well as knowledge spillovers brought about by locating in the same shared
building (Entrepreneur 3). Other respondents mentioned of similar shared office space
in Hammersmith where startups they knew were congregated and worked together
(Entrepreneur 1; 4; 7; 9). While evidence of externalities is less plentiful in these two
areas as they were less vibrant than in Shoreditch, it is evident that they had some
degree of normative legitimacy as externalities were present. However, information
about them is hard to find, particularly, there are no narratives that attempt to position
them within the broader socio-economic landscape, and thus cognitive legitimacy was
not present.
While the earlier narrative produced by the ‘notable founders’was to convince others of
the benefits of a potential cluster in Shoreditch, the Silicon Roundabout name provided
something for people involved in the software industry to grasp onto and identify with.
It gave them a focal point to expand their community around and made the cluster appar-
ent to those in Shoreditch and the broader socio-economic landscape, thus providing cog-
nitive legitimacy. It was this that was the catalyst for an expansion of activity in the area as
accelerators and co-working spaces began to launch soon after (Accelerator Director 1; 2),
along with an influx of investors, entrepreneurs and startups who bought the narrative that
this was the London software cluster (Entrepreneur 4; 5). After the 85 firms in 2010 had
expanded to over 200 in 2011, it is suggested that by 2017 there are as many as 5900 soft-
ware firms in the London software cluster. What had become Silicon Roundabout has
since gone on to be rebranded East London Tech City and later simply Tech City, to
reflect the expansion of the cluster outwards from the Old Street roundabout in Shore-
ditch, into the surrounding neighbourhoods of East London, before growing further
into areas outside of East London such as Soho and Camden (Nathan and Vandore
2019). Despite this expansion, when Tech City U.K., the organization aimed at driving
further growth, take interested people on tours of the cluster, they focus their story on
the area around Shoreditch and the Silicon Roundabout as the place that it can all be
traced back to (Entrepreneur 4; Government actor 1).
5. The emergence of the Singapore software cluster
Just as in London, it was 2006 when the emergence phase of the Singapore software cluster
began:
[the resurgence in government interest] was around 2006 …it was a slow start …around
2008 we spent a lot of money …then about 2010 things start to get interesting. (Government
actor 1)
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 953
However, the narrative that emerged was not driven by entrepreneurs but instead by
government actors. The preconditions in Singapore were the opposite of London’sin
that there were a lack of active software entrepreneurs in the city; instead, an active gov-
ernment were present who were set on creating a software cluster in Singapore as they saw
it as vital in securing the future of the country’s economic development.
On 3 January 2006, Tony Tan, the Executive Director of the Government of Singapore
Investment Corporation, pushed for funding to promote technology through the creation
of the National Research Foundation (NRF 2018), by producing the narrative that the Sin-
gaporean economy needs a strong software cluster moving forwards. In securing S$500 m
for innovation and enterprise around the software ecosystem (Government actor 1), it
showed that the Singapore government aligned behind the narrative that developing a
software cluster in Singapore through policy change was vitally important in securing
future economic development, thus providing the regulatory legitimacy for the potential
cluster.
The government actors, as cluster advocates, had a goal to introduce policies to stimu-
late the growth of a software cluster. Soon after the government introduced a suite of pro-
grammes to help stimulate growth in firms and investors. Examples of such generous
policies are the Early Stage Venture Funding scheme that matched S$10 m of venture
capital firm investments, Proof of Concept grants that offered S$250,000 per person for
an idea, or the Technology Incubation Scheme that would provide 85% of an investment
up to S$500,000 (NRF 2018). However, by 2009 a cluster was yet to emerge; despite the
narrative of a software cluster firmly embedded within the regulatory environment of Sin-
gapore, externalities and thus the cluster itself had failed to materialize. Although some
software firms were present across Singapore, there was not any spatial co-location
between them, let alone any meaningful interactions and externalities:
Between 2006 and 2009, there was no ecosystem. There were a few individual players, but
they weren’t really innovation driven and the government had a fragmented view. So in
2009 we recognised that there was intellectual and financial capital, but no social capital.
(Accelerator director 2)
Thus, the attempt at making a software cluster through regulatory legitimacy and the
creation of new policies ultimately failed as the everyday behaviours that provided extern-
alities and normative legitimacy had not materialized.
Frustrated with this, four entrepreneurs, namely Meng Wong, Justin Lee, Luther Goh,
and Chua Ruimen, attempted to do something about the lack of beneficial externalities for
software firms, and so launched Hackerspace.sg in mid-2009 at 70A Bussorah Street.
These cluster advocates launched Hackerspace.sg with a narrative of a community-
oriented ‘Hacker-space’(Meng 2009b), which would ‘be open to the community, 24 h’
(Meng 2009a), and that was to be ‘the Singapore tech scene’s community centre’, and dis-
seminated the narrative through discussions with other entrepreneurs and in the content
on its website (Hackerspace.sg 2019):
We realised if we were gunna build social capital, the country was missing a makerspace, a
coworking space, so we set up Hackerspace.sg. It was a coworking space during the day, Sin-
gapore’sfirst, and at evening was a geek hangout. Incredibly dynamic [with many] commu-
nities of interest [that] needed a place to come into conversation with one another for their
mutual benefit. (Accelerator director 2)
954 J. L. HARRIS
Hackerspace.sg had an immediate effect by hosting events most days of the week and
having co-working space, quickly attracting around 80 regular members (Accelerator
director 3). This indicates that there were over 80 software entrepreneurs around Singa-
pore that the policies had failed to connect. As increasingly more actors experienced Hack-
erspace.sg, its narrative as the community hub in Singapore was embraced and the cluster
became cognitively legitimized in the socio-economic landscape of Singapore.
The utilization of Hackerspace.sg as a community focal point enabled externalities to
emerge in that specific location as spatially disparate actors came together, bringing
with them their knowledge, expertise and problems. These actors were then able to
draw upon the growing community of actors to help resolve their problems, and assist
with those of others. Investors found startups that were in need of funding (Entrepreneur
12), entrepreneurs found assistance with securing the benefits of the government’s policies
(Entrepreneur 13), firms that needed new employees found them (Entrepreneur 14), and it
facilitated the knowledge spillovers and networking that enabled firms to resolve everyday
problems (Entrepreneur 15). Thus, the co-working space and events provided ensured
that firms had a place to engage and support one another (Enterpreneur 12; 14; 15), pro-
ducing externalities and normatively legitimizing the emerging cluster. The most notable
success story to emerge was that the founders of Viki, a successful software platform for
watching TV online, who met there while using the shared co-working space and built a
successful enough software startup that Rakuten later acquired it for $200 m (Accelerator
Director 2).
After seeing the success of Hackerspace.sg in facilitating cluster externalities, the gov-
ernment realized that they needed to foster the type of community necessary to produce
cluster externalities, and that the close proximity of these actors facilitated that, rather than
their policies. Another government actor, Michael Yap, suggested renting three unused
factories in the Ayer Rajah Estate that were due for demolition at S$1.65 per sq ft per
month, rather than the normal S$3.80, believing that they would be an ideal place to
bring a community of startups together on the scale that the government imagined (Accel-
erator director 3). This marked a shift in narrative from creating policies with financial
incentives to one that recognizes the importance of community. With these old factories,
the government launched Blk71, named after the main factory building.
At the same time, it was suggested to the founders of Hackerspace.sg that they become
one of the anchor tenants of Blk71, as having such important advocates was vital in selling
the government’s narrative that this could be the focal point of an even bigger software
cluster. The founders were sceptical that government intervention would ruin what the
community had done with Hackerspace.sg. However, they recognized that the facilities
on offer at Blk71 offered the potential for a much larger community hub in the long-
run and so founded the Joyful Frog Digital Innovation (JFDI.Asia) accelerator (Accelera-
tor director 3), cognitively legitimizing the narrative put forward by the government that
Blk71 would become the focal point of the Singapore software cluster.
Besides accelerating startups, JFDI.Asia also provided value in the form of weekly open-
house events, which enabled people to take part in social gatherings where ‘a random col-
lection of geeks, entrepreneurs, investors and creatives gather to eat cheese and change the
world’(JFDI.Asia 2018). This provided an alternative to Hackerspace.sg, which continued
to run. It supplied an additional place with normative legitimacy to meet people, discuss
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 955
ideas, and benefit from externalities, often attracting hundreds of people, and anchored the
entirety of Blk71:
I do think we were very pivotal in putting it [Blk71] on the map because we started running
open house events and over five years we ran well over 300. I know of at least two couples
who got married, four children that exist, 10,000 people who came to those events who
met because of us, multiple companies. (Accelerator director 3)
Since then, the cluster has grown around the Blk71 area, to become what the Economist
branded ‘the densest ecosystem in the world’(Economist, 2014):
I think that that one initiative [Blk71] was probably the most valuable thing in fostering the
startup ecosystem. (Accelerator director 3)
Hackerspace.sg remains a key place in the cluster but the narrative of Blk71 as the
centre has been successful in legitimizing it as the focal point of the cluster. Blk71 has
since expanded to include six new buildings, and been rebranded as Launchpad. The Sin-
gapore software cluster is now thought to encompass many other areas in Singapore, such
as Telok Ayer and Tanjong Pagar, with approximately 4125 software firms in 2017 (Tech-
InAsia 2018).
6. Rethinking the process of cluster emergence to include legitimacy
These cases have portrayed contrasting stories about cluster emergence in the software
industry. Two main areas of analysis emerge from these stories: the varied role and impor-
tance of the three types of legitimacy and the vital role of path advocates and their narra-
tives; and the potential for inter-path dynamics, both between emerging clusters and with
the broader region. This section will elaborate on these issues in turn.
The understanding of cluster emergence in the literature is that it has occurred once
there are externality-producing interactions between actors. In a legitimacy perspective,
this equates to normative legitimacy, and is an essential element of cluster emergence.
It is present in the successful examples provided here, and absent from the Singapore gov-
ernment’s failed initial attempt. However, the findings indicate that the process of cluster
emergence goes beyond the binary attainment of normative legitimacy, and can better be
understood through the iterative relationship between normative, cognitive, and regulat-
ory legitimacies. In London, the three concurrently emerging clusters all had some degree
of normative legitimacy as actors engaged in externality-producing activities. Despite this
normative legitimacy, there was no awareness of these clusters by actors in the broader
economic landscape until actors constructed the Silicon Roundabout narrative. This nar-
rative legitimized one of the three emerging clusters, the Shoreditch cluster. It meant that
the Shoreditch cluster and the externalities available there, became common knowledge
amongst firms and other actors in the broader socio-economic landscape, which in turn
facilitated a significant growth in the amount of firms and activity in the cluster as external
actors in the broader socio-economic landscape (re)located there. Thus, it was not simply
normative legitimacy that generated cluster emergence, but the complementarity between
normative and cognitive legitimacies. For the two other London clusters, both having nor-
mative legitimacy but no cognitive legitimacy, it meant that no one outside of the clusters
were aware of their presence and they were therefore still emerging.
956 J. L. HARRIS
Integral in this process was the role of cluster advocates and the narratives they weaved.
Cluster advocates are important not just because of the messages purveyed in their narra-
tives, but also the scales that they can target. The message itself is, of course, important
because it must convince others of the legitimacy of the cluster, but the scale is equally
important because it facilitates cognitive legitimacy.
The early advocates in the Shoreditch area were entrepreneurs who wanted to create a
community of entrepreneurs who would actively engage in mutually beneficial activities,
facilitated by co-locating in a particular office space, and so created a narrative reflecting
that and which was made possible by the presence of very cheap office space. This worked
well for normatively legitimizing the cluster and creating externalities, but had limitations,
as other actors were unaware of the emerging clusters’presence. In contrast, the advocates
behind the popularization of Silicon Roundabout were technology journalists, one of
which had a particular drive to see a technology hub emerge, while others to document
the London technology scene. Consequently, the narrative they created was of Silicon Round-
about as the ‘London’software cluster, and so positioned their narrative at a higher spatial
scale. This narrative made Silicon Roundabout the focal point of London’s software cluster.
This also explains the success of Hackerspace.sg and Blk71 in Singapore. While in the
case of the Shoreditch/Silicon Roundabout cluster, two narratives were necessary for the
cluster to emerge, the Hackerspace.sg and Blk71 examples demonstrate the potential for
one, well placed, narrative to be sufficient. Both of these narratives were positioned at a
Singapore-wide scale, rather than solely at the local scale of a specific district, like Shore-
ditch. The narratives of Hackerspace.sg and Blk71 as the hubs for all of Singapore attracted
actors from across Singapore; in the process, actors produced the everyday interactions
necessary for externalities and normative legitimacy. Thus, the scale at which narratives
are targeted is as important as the actual content of the narrative. Furthermore, it demon-
strates the iterative nature of the emergence process. In both cases, the narrative of creat-
ing a cluster predated the actual creation of externalities. Thus, while both cognitive and
normative legitimacies are integral to completing the process of cluster emergence, they
need not occur in a fixed order.
The Singapore cases also offer insights to potentially competing (anti)narratives.
However, rather than competing, by incorporating members of the Hackerspace.sg com-
munity in the Blk71 narrative, it became a narrative of complementary spaces where Blk71
embraced the Hackerspace.sg culture but offered a larger space. This probably would not
have been possible for government actors alone and shows the necessity of community
figures as key advocates in narrative construction. It suggests that utilizing other existing
and similar narratives may be a useful strategy for path advocates. In London, there were
never any competitive (anti)narratives. The advocates promoting Silicon Roundabout did
not seek to slander other areas; rather, they essentially won by default, as narratives were
not constructed for the other areas. It is therefore easy to see how, if the pivotal MOO
summer party had been hosted at London Bridge, a narrative produced there (a Silicon
Bridge, perhaps) would have been adopted by key cluster advocates and pushed with
no alternatives emerging, reshaping the emergence and path development of the
present-day London software cluster. This shows that, on the one hand, narratives are
adopted more easily without competition, but on the other, it reifies the importance of
narratives. Rather than it being a matter of competing narratives, it is instead a matter
of gaining the first-mover advantage offered by merely having a narrative.
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 957
Regulatory is the only type of legitimacy that is not mandatory, but one that can appear
at any time during the emergence process and also requires an appropriate scalar focal
point to achieve effectiveness. The emergence of the Singapore cluster initially was due
to key actors creating externalities at the micro scale, within Hackerspace.sg, rather
than the highly generous policies that the government initiated. It was only once govern-
ment actors realized the benefits of having a dense spatial focal point to produce particular
externalities that their regulatory legitimacy produced tangible outcomes through the cre-
ation of Blk71. In London, regulatory legitimacy did not play a role in cluster emergence,
at all. Evidently, cluster policy is not necessary for cluster emergence to occur, and while it
can be helpful, Blk71 has shown that they may need a spatial focal point to maximize the
chance of cluster externalities emerging. These findings correlate with Emmoth, Persson,
and Lundberg’s(2015) argument that top-down cluster initiatives need to be legitimized to
be successful. In the case of these software clusters, this is at the micro scale within shared
office spaces. This demonstrates the multi-scalar nature of legitimacy in cluster evolution,
as while normative occurs in this case at the micro scale, it must be complimented by a
cognitive legitimacy aimed at a scale large enough to attract new entrants, and potentially
by a regulatory legitimacy aimed at a scale small enough to maximize its benefits.
The findings also have implications for the emerging discussions on inter-path relations
(Hassink, Isaksen, and Trippl 2019). In both cases, software firms, and thus a software
industry, were present in the city-regions before the clusters emerged, and yet the emer-
ging clusters completely reshaped the pattern of firms within the region. The presence of
clusters in the two cases provided firms within the broader city-regions and beyond, a
place to (re)locate in to access externalities. These clusters have anchored the growth of
software firms in the broader city-regions as they are now recognized as two of the
largest clusters in the world. When industry reports discuss the clusters, they refer to
them as ‘London’and ‘Singapore’, rather than ‘Shoreditch’or ‘Blk71’as firms now
locate far beyond these places but within the city-region, yet it was the externalities
present in these clusters that triggered such a growth in firms throughout the broader
city-regions.
However, London also showed that there may be multiple emerging clusters, each
representing distinct paths that can be operating independently of one another, but
within the same industry and region. Given this knowledge, the concepts of anti(narra-
tives) and path advocates become increasingly important as these paths are inherently
competing against one another, as demonstrated in London. In that regard, the paper
echoes the findings of Binz, Truffer, and Coenen (2016) in that the location of actors
matters; however, while they highlight the importance of actors from outside of a
region in the legitimization process, the findings here demonstrate that the intra-regional
geography of actors is of note, particularly in the case of London and its multiple emerging
clusters.
This highlights the importance of a more fine-grained spatial analysis of emerging
industries in regions, as there could be multiple pathways at work (Hassink, Isaksen,
and Trippl 2019). It may be the case that multiple niches, or emerging clusters, are in
place and that the resources from these pathways could be combined in ways that
create a better pathway in the long run. Alternatively, the promotion of one pathway
may occur when a better placed pathway is present, damaging the long-run growth of
the broader region or industry.
958 J. L. HARRIS
7. Conclusion
This paper demonstrates the varied importance of the three types of legitimacy, and the
role of advocates and their narratives in facilitating these legitimacies, for cluster emer-
gence. The cases here demonstrate the limitation of the existing understanding of
cluster emergence that focuses on the binary presence of externalities and highlights
instead the integral relationship between normative and cognitive legitimacies, as well
as the potential benefits of regulatory legitimacy. It has shown that successful cluster emer-
gence depends on the interaction between the types of legitimacy, and that failure to
emerge suggests some deficiencies in one or more of the legitimacies. In doing so, it high-
lights the importance for economic geographers to incorporate understandings of norma-
tive and cognitive legitimacy into future research on cluster emergence and for policy
makers to understand their utility when attempting their own regulatory legitimacy.
Furthermore, the scalar properties of the legitimacies are vital to understand, illustrat-
ing that cluster emergence is a process that goes beyond the local scale, and shows that
geographers have a role in developing the legitimacy concept further. Importantly, the
three concurrently emerging clusters in the London case emphasizes that the literature
on cluster evolution should integrate further with EEG more broadly, largely due to the
novel contributions a synthesis could offer to future debates on inter-path dynamics
(Harris 2020). How such new clusters are legitimized may have implications for the
growth of not just the clusters, but the technological, industrial, and thus the regional
pathways. As Martin and Sunley (2015) have previously argued, clusters are complex
systems embedded within many other complex systems, and the inter-related paths of
these systems deserve further attention.
Moving forward, the cluster literature should play greater attention not just to the prop-
erties of the externalities found in clusters, but to the roles of actors and the (anti)narra-
tives that they create which may affect cluster evolution. Furthermore, this suggests that
cluster policy should endeavour to be more actor-based and engage with the community
to ensure the acceptance of policy ventures. Greater attention should be paid to the iden-
tities or brands given to clusters and how they are interpreted by firms. Academically, this
means working with literatures on branding and identities (Nathan and Vandore 2019),
and from a policy perspective ensuring that attempts to develop clusters are going to be
accepted by firms, and not seen as overly top-down government attempts. Finally, and
drawing on Binz, Truffer, and Coenen (2016), both academics and policy makers
should focus on the locations of actors and the narratives that they produce. The legiti-
macy concept is recent to economic geography, but the findings here demonstrate the
importance of a geographical perspective.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Jack Laurie Harris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8441-1661
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 959
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