Clusters and Comic Books: An Alternative Look at a Mainstream Topic

摘要

As Book Review Editor for Economic Development Quarterly (EDQ) I am sent a large number of scholarly books from publishers in the hope that I will find them of sufficient potential interest to readers of the journal that I will commission a review. These books are diverse in the topics that they cover. For example, recent topics that have been covered by reviewed books include labor shortages, knowledge commercialization, universities as economic drivers, suburban poverty, and economic forecasting. While diverse in their topics all of these books are fairly traditional in their approach to the topic in question-every book comprising a number of logically organized chapters, each covering a different sub-topic spread across several hundred pages of text that is supported, where appropriate, with tables, graphs, and maps. So it was with great interest when Clusters and Your Economy: An Illustrated Introduction by Joseph Cortright, Lotte Langkilde, Mike Russel, Adrian Wallace, and Bill Mudron appeared in my mailbox. Here was a publication that dealt with a mainstream topic-industrial clusters-that I knew would be of great interest to readers of EDQ, but whose presentation-comic-book style-was quite different and very nontraditional.