Jennifer Clark, Assistant Professor in the Ivan Allen College School of Public Policy, and co-author Susan Christopherson (City and Regional Planning, Cornell) have won the 2009 Regional Studies Association Best Book Award for their work Remaking Regional Economies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Economy(Routledge, 2008).

Clark and Christopherson's book explores a field widely studied in Europe and Canada, but rarely in the U.S. The book has drawn an unusual amount of attention: it has been positively reviewed in five academic journals spanning both US and UK-based publications and several social science disciplines including the Journal of Economic Geography, Regional Studies, Growth and Change, Economic Geography, and the British Journal of Industrial Relations.

The Regional Studies Association which bestowed the award is an international forum for regional development and policy research based in the United Kingdom. Clark and Christopherson will be recognized at an awards luncheon in the House of Lords in London.

About the Book

Since the early 1980s, the region has been central to thinking about the emerging character of the global economy. In fields as diverse as business management, industrial relations, economic geography, sociology, and planning, the regional scale has emerged as an organizing concept for interpretations of economic change.

The book is both a critique of the "new regionalism" and a return to the "regional question," including all of its concerns with equity and uneven development. It will challenge researchers and students to consider the region as a central scale of action in the global economy, and at the core of the book are case studies of two industries that rely on skilled, innovative, and flexible workers - the optics and imaging industry and the film and television industry. Combined with this is a discussion of the regions that constitute their production centers. The authors' intensive research on photonics and entertainment media firms, both large and small, leads them to question some basic assumptions behind the new regionalism and to develop an alternative framework for understanding regional economic development policy. Finally, there is a re-examination of what the regional question means for the concept of the learning region.

This book draws on the rich contemporary literature on the region but also addresses theoretical questions that preceded "the new regionalism." It will contribute to teaching and research in a range of social science disciplines and this new paperback edition will also make the book more accessible to students and researchers in those disciplines, those individuals who will influence the re-structuring economies of the 21st century.