Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 82 (2012) 338–351 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization j our na l ho me p age: www.elsevier.com/locate/jebo Forms of emergence and the evolution of economic landscapes Ron Martin a,* , Peter Sunley b a Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, UK b School of Geography, University of Southampton, UK a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 28 February 2011 Received in revised form 27 July 2011 Accepted 15 August 2011 Available online 31 August 2011 JEL classification: B15 R11 R12 Keywords: Emergence Economic landscape Clusters Evolution Path dependence a b s t r a c t Over the past two decades, the notion of ‘emergence’ has attracted increasing attention and controversy across the social science, including economics. Within this context, as economic geographers, our concern in this paper is with the usefulness of the idea of emergence for studying the economic landscape and its evolution. The paper considers in what sense geographical processes and places can legitimately be described as emer- gent, how such places themselves produce emergent effects, and how we should conceive of and study the ‘emergent’ space economy. To do this, we apply Deacon’s (2006) models of first-order, second-order and third-order emergence, and trace through their implica- tions for constructing an ‘emergence perspective’ in economic geography. The notion of third-order emergence is argued to be the most promising, since it focuses explicitly on emergence as an evolutionary process. What is evident, however, is that a notion developed mainly for applications in physical and biological systems requires further elaboration and exploration if it is to provide explanatory leverage in studying the evolution of economic landscapes. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Like alcohol, [the theory of emergence] is a stimulant only in proper doses; many who have used it have gotten drunk in the attempt to apply it to everything (Ablowitz, 1939). There is a glaring absence of bold social theories which uncompromisingly make ‘emergence’ their central tenet (Archer, 1995). The emergent properties of the entirety and the laws for its causal interactions are determined by the spacing and timing of the parts as well as by the properties of the parts themselves. The very essence of evolutionary progress is in the new timing and new spacing of the parts (Sperry, 1986). 1. Introduction Over the past two decades, the notion of ‘emergence’ has attracted increasing attention and controversy across the social sciences (see, for example, Bickhard, 2000; Cunningham, 2001; Sawyer, 2001, 2005; Kim, 2006; Clayton and Davies, 2006; Lawson, 2003, 2010). This current wave of interest in fact marks a resurgence and revival of an earlier literature (for sur- veys, see Stephan, 1992; Sawyer, 2005), and particularly the debates on the meaning and significance of ‘emergentism’ that occurred during the 1920s and 1930s (see Alexander, 1920; Morgan, 1923; Lovejoy, 1926; Pepper, 1926; Ablowitz, 1939). Two streams of literature appear to be driving this recent ‘rediscovery’ of emergence. On the one hand, the growth * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 01223 338316; fax: +44 01223 338340. E-mail addresses: rlm1@cam.ac.uk (R. Martin), P.J.Sunley@soton.ac.uk (P. Sunley). 0167-2681/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2011.08.005