Storper, Michael (1954–)

One of the discipline's leading economic geographers, Michael Storper is well known for his rigorous interrogations of the spatiality of capitalism. His work lies at, and has forged, the intersections of economic development, technological change, innovation and creativity, trade, globalization, and the political economy of regions.

A doctoral student of Richard Walker at the University of California, Berkeley, Storper began his career in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1982, and he continues to be affiliated with the School of Public Affairs there. From 1996 to 2002, Storper served as a professor of sociology at the University of Marne-la-Vallée, France, and continues as a professor of economic sociology at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. In 2004, he assumed a Centennial Chair in Economic Geography at the London School of Economics (LSE), but he divides his time between the LSE and UCLA. Storper is thus an important intellectual on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and writes in both English and French. His papers and books have been noted for their theoretical sophistication and ability to draw together diverse topics and lines of thought, [Page 2696]both traditional and contemporary, into elegant syntheses.

Storper's works have long been important in several subject areas of economic geography. His earlier papers, for example, offered stinging critiques of the product cycle as simplistic and unidimensional. The Capitalist Imperative, coauthored with Walker in 1989, marked a foundaional summary of economic geography in light of the rising prominence of Marxism and the centrality of the division of labor. In the 1980s, Storper played a key role in the formation of the informal “Los Angeles School” of urban analysis, which paved the way for understandings of economic landscapes in light of the emergence of post-Fordist complexes of flexible production. His work was central, for example, to the emerging conceptions of how and why firms adopted new technologies; their relations to uncertainty, transaction costs, and economies of scale and scope; and how labor markets fluctuated in response. Empirically, he analyzed, among other things, the U.S. film industry and its locational dynamics.

By the 1990s, Storper's career led him toward systematic understandings of the dynamics of regional change more broadly, particularly the contingent trajectories faced by different types of places as they grappled with the changing constraints and opportunities generated by the global division of labor. In The Regional World, which appeared in 1997, he sketched a view of a world economy dominated by a necklace of world city-regions, in which agglomeration economies facilitate processes of creativity and innovation. He also took into account issues such as different forms of institutional organization, flows of knowledge, patterns of decision making, regional convergence and divergence, and the spatial scales at which varying social and spatial processes operate to lay out several possible “worlds of production.” He offered comparative analyses of regions in Western Europe, the United States, and Brazil. More recently, he has turned to the role of “buzz,” or dense webs of face-to-face contact for the exchange of tacit knowledge among key actors as mechanisms of regional competitiveness and innovation.

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