Cooperative research in international studies: Insights from economic geography

This article visits two highly integrative concepts deployed in contemporary economic geography – firm network analysis and embeddedness, and introduces the geographical approach to the study of globalization processes in an effort to generate cooperative synergies between the fields of international studies and geography. Geographical theorization with respect to interdisciplinary cooperation has begun to come full circle, from a borrower to a donor, as evidenced by its appearance in work in the fields of business, economics, sociology, and political science. This has further compelled geographers to emphasize analyses focusing on processes of change rather than a perpetuation of static models. However, there is still room for cooperative efforts that more robustly integrate insights pertaining to economic behavior, culture, and politics into spatially-sensitive theorization and research practice. This article draws extensively on the broadening role of East Asia, coupled with an accelerating cross-disciplinary emphasis on globalization, to demonstrate the value of analyses that simultaneously capture the activity of multiple actors operating at multiple scales in and across space.