BOOK REVIEWS MANUFACTURING CULTURE:THE INSTITUTIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF INDUSTRIAL PRACTICE By Meric Gertler, Oxford/NYC: Oxford University Press. 2004. 201 pp. $95.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 0-19-823382. Over the last two decades, Professor Gertler and other scholars working in and around economic geography have fleshed out fairly intricate, theoretically heterodox frameworks of regional political economy. Gertler’s compactly written Manufacturing Culture: The Institutional Geography of Industrial Practice highlights his contributions, which examine the role of institutions in shaping regional economic development and how the composition and working of these institutions varies by national and regional context. The book contains seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the larger conceptual backdrop against which the following six chapters unfold. I was mildly disappointed that the chapters recast material previously published as six articles, but this practice is nothing new in the social sciences. However, the preface was actually one of the more lucid I have read recently, and along with the introductory chapter it helps binds together what threat- ened to be disconnected chapters. Through the course of the chapters, Gertler reveals his interest in the relationship between industrial culture, learning and innovation, national competitiveness, and regional prosperity. A central methodological premise that runs throughout the empirical chapters is that case studies, and especially longitudinal case studies, provide an important means of understanding this relationship. Chapter 1 provides a nicely nuanced critique of the literature about the role of institutions at various scales in shaping local, regional, and national economic develop- ment. While Gertler’s interest emerges from the literature on national industrial crises popular in the 1980s, he transitions into a discussion of culture generally and institutions in particular that shape places’ and firms’ development trajectories. He makes a distinc- tion between institutions that operate at the societal level, the attitudes and values that are shared by members of that society but experienced at the individual level, and economic behavior expressed as firms’ industrial practices (Gertler 2004:7). The distinction between these three tends to hold up throughout the rest of the chapters although could be made more explicit at times to add additional continuity. Chapter 1 also trots out summaries of each of the following chapters before incorporating a review of the litera- ture from various camps associated with the (un)importance of proximity in enhancing firm-level and regional competitive advantage, succinctly problematizing the notion of proximity. He ends with three clear policy implications: “best practice” is a problematic notion; it is important to have domestic producers of advanced machinery if firms in that country use those machines; and piecemeal approaches to enhancing individual firms’ competitiveness will be less effective if they do not take place within a series of more tightly articulated interventions (at the regional or national scale) which alter the ways labor markets are regulated and investments are financed. Growth and Change Vol. 38 No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 153–166