February 2006 Geography and Strategy (Advances in Strategic Management, Vol. 20) By: Joel Baum and Olav Sorenson (eds.) JAI PRESS, ELSEVIER, 20040762310340 Reviewed By: David M. Brock BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV JIBS Book Review Distance is not dead….yet Question: What do the following have in common: (1) banking in Miami 1 , (2) pairing food and wine 2 , (3) movies 3 , and (4) business success 4 in general? Answer: According to recent internet news sites (endnoted), they all depend on the same things long considered the three most important factors in real estate; namely location, location, and location. On the one hand it seems that place and space—or geography—are vital variables for a range of commercial activities. On the other hand contemporary technology-enabled information and communication capability has led some authors to write about the “death of distance” (e.g., Cairncross, 1997; Capling & Nossal, 2001; Morgan, 2004; Wilson, 2001), implying that geography is no longer a key strategic variable. The “Editors’ introduction” to Geography and Strategy (Sorenson & Baum) begins by echoing this contradiction. They then present the two aims of this volume: First to highlight the spatial dimension among Strategy researchers. And to galvanize researchers from the various disciplines—like management, geography, economics, and sociology. The opening chapter also contains a useful table summarizing the 13 contributed papers. The remainder of the book is divided into three parts, each with four or five articles. I suspect that Part I, “Strategic management of place,” will be the most interesting to those JIBS readers more interested in managerial processes. Here we read of knowledge spillovers, knowledge and entrepreneurial activity (Audretsch); location-specific differences for pharmaceutical labs in North America and Europe (Furman); population dynamics and founding of U.S. television stations (Sorensen & Sorenson); and cognitive foundations of competition in New York City hotels (Baum & Lant). Most of the articles in Part II, "Strategic management of space," employ research approaches less common to JIBS such as economic and/or mathematical modeling. Among the empirical work we see how interlocking loan and director networks of Japanese manufacturing affiliates in the E.U. relate to clustering and diffusion of locations (Bastos & Greve); and data from six U.S. supermarket chains show how national grocery brands performs differently across regions of the country (Bronnenberg & Albuquerque). Part III, “Combined perspectives,” will resonate most with readers looking for empirical research. More learning and diffusion of TQM is found within (rather than among) various divisions of a multinational bank (Strang). This is one of the relatively few findings when geography seems to matter less. The next two studies both use domestic data from U.S. firms: Pharmaceutical laboratories Page 1 of 3