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This paper explores the expertise of field-level advisors in rural land management. The context is the English uplands and negotiation over a Higher Level Stewardship agreement. An observed encounter between a hill farmer, his retained land agent, and an ecologist working for Natural England illustrates the multiple roles that field-level advisors have in regulating, directing, and influencing contemporary land management. The paper draws on field notes taken during work shadowing and in-depth interviews, to reflect upon the relationships that constitute field expertise-not only between farmer and advisor, but amongst the advisors too (and those who advise them). We argue that expert-expert interaction and the emergence of networks of practice are crucial to the development of field expertise and are key factors in the increasing complexity of the decision making underpinning contemporary land management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst personal knowledge networks between organisations have been argued to be important for regional economic development, their functioning and, within this context, the exact role of spatial proximity has been empirically underexplored. This paper addresses these issues by, first, examining the dynamic mechanisms of the formation, maintenance, and knowledge interaction of important knowledge relationships of R&D workers in the Cambridge information technology cluster in the UK. It is demonstrated that personal relations tended to transform from an initially professional context into privately governed relationships. Furthermore, it is argued that a sophisticated understanding of the role of spatial proximity requires an investigation of the spatiality of several stages of the network mechanisms. The results show that permanent spatial proximity and face-to-face interaction are more important for the formation of relationships than for the maintenance stage and, in particular, for work-related knowledge interactions. Finally, it is argued that, in contrast to the emphasis in much of the literature on communities of practice and epistemic communities, the knowledge relationships do not tend to be anchored in collective groups. Instead, the paper highlights the usefulness of the concept of individualised networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between formal networks, such as business and occupationally based professional networks, and place in determining network patterns and types in regional economic development. It distinguishes between 'network-rich' and 'network-poor' regions and considers why and how formal networks operate as a service and a resource to participants and as components of regional business infrastructures. Formal networks in the Oxfordshire to Cambridge Arc in the UK are used to illustrate these points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A somewhat overlooked aspect of the geography of 'after-Fordist' regulation concerns the precise role of different branches of the state in managing tensions between local economic development and the collective provision of social and physical infrastructure. In the United Kingdom, the state's reluctance to manage or spatially redistribute growth in the South East has resulted in localised pressures on housing markets, the land-use planning system, infrastructure, and the environment, intensifying struggles between progrowth and antigrowth factions in certain places. In this paper the authors examine conflicts arising from the rapid growth of new economic spaces in and around the Cambridge subregion and explore various attempts by different branches of the state and locally dependent factions of capital to overcome barriers to further growth within existing and proposed frameworks for territorial management. A key arena of conflict in this instance centres upon land-use planning and provision of infrastructure. The Cambridge 'growth crisis' raises a series of issues about the ability of interests claiming to represent nationally important city-regions to detach such places from their formative local and national modes of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]