The explorative case study aims to understand how the reform of business support and development undergoing in Stockholm municipality addresses existing institutions, and to what extent does the institutional context have the potential to adopt and sustain the change. Two case studies, Högdalen industrial area and Årsta wholesale center, illustrate how local economic development is organized in practice. A new policy document, Näringslivspolicy, is analyzed, along with interviews with key public and private agents. Two institutional theoretical frameworks are used: a dynamic perspective on the interaction between regulations and institutions and the concept of institutional thickness. Findings indicate that the examined reform is an example of institutional policymaking as it addresses institutional foundations underlying behavioral practices. Furthermore, empirical evidence shows that the City of Stockholm intends to adopt a place- and problem-based approach to local economic development, but its organizational forms are not specified at this stage. Findings illustrate (not exhaustively) factors of efficient external collaboration that reflect those in recent literature and can be used in future policy revisions. The success of the initiated reform might provide the fundament for improvements in future local economic development initiatives.

This thesis develops a relational geography perspective on creative work and practice, with a specific focus on the recording studio sector. Drawing on an extensive social network analysis, a questionnaire survey, and nineteen semi-structured interviews with recording studio engineers and producers in London (UK), the thesis reveals how recording studios are constituted by a number of types of relations. Firstly, studios are spaces that involve a material and technological relationality between studio workers and varied means of production. Studios are material and technological spaces that influence and shape human actions and social inter-actions. Secondly, studios are sites of relationality between social actors, including engineers, musicians and artists. The thesis reveals how the ability to construct and maintain social relations, and perform emotional labour , is of particular importance to the management of the creative process of producing and recording music, and to building the individual social capital of studio workers. Finally, the thesis argues that studios are sites of changing employment relations between studio workers and studio as employer. In the recording studio sector, a complex and changing set of employment practices have re-defined the relationship between employee and employer and resulted in a set of employment relations characterised by constant employment uncertainty for freelance studio workers. It is argued that the three types of relations revealed in this thesis, manifest at a multiplicity of geographical scales, construct recording studios as distinctive social and economic creative spaces. In conclusion, it is argued that a relational perspective is central to progressing geographical accounts of creative work and of project-based industries in general.

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