With all its increased mobility of capital, goods and labor, modern globalization has failed to produce a placeless market economy. Contrary to expectations, local differences between regional economies have more radically emerged creating uneven economic landscapes and increasing varieties of market systems. Regions and localities increasingly compete to attract and hold down resources through innovation, while civil society straggles to fill in the gaps of shrinking national regulating systems. Social and economic networks plays a key role in shaping these local pathways to development. Although social network analysis does offer valuable research techniques to capture and explore regional and global shifts in the spatial economy, there has been only limited cross-fertilization between the fields of network research and economic geography. This session aims to explore and promote the multiple intersections between the connectivity of networks on the one hand and the geographical relations in the economy on the other. Among other potential topics, we particularly invite:

1. Methods and empirical applications to examine the interactions among individual actors, within and between organizations across space, and in global structures within the context of globalization

2. Empirical illustrations of key concepts in economic geography such as path dependence, local clusters, knowledge spillovers, global city networks, peripheral regions, economic landscapes and global production networks to name but a few. 

2. Methods and application to examine the new role and dynamics of social movements in the process of recent globalization

3. Relational theories and concepts on market systems, local production and innovation networks, and global value chains etc.