[MGT&SOC Research Seminar] ‘Resourcing for Local Economic Inclusion: Resource Geographies and Nested Opportunities’
Thursday, February 13th, 2025
2:30pm – 4pm in Paris (PR13) & Lille campus (B252) & on Zoom
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Speaker:
Tom Lawrence – Saïd Business School – University of Oxford, USA
ABSTRACT
Enabling local economic inclusion often hinges on local actors with deep knowledge and lived experience of the economic barriers faced by individuals and households in materially disadvantaged local communities.
These actors, however, often struggle to access sufficient financial assets, relationships, knowledge, and technologies to create economic opportunities for marginalized groups. We adopt a resourcing perspective to explore how organizations draw on local and non-local objects to create resources and enable economic inclusion in local communities.
Focusing on one organization working in an economically depressed city in the northeastern United States, we conducted a longitudinal, qualitative study over a 10-year period. We observed that the founders and staff of Generator—an incubator and makerspace that worked to enable local economic inclusion in the East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, NY—engaged in resourcing strategies that stemmed from their experience of the resource environments in which they were situated, and that led to the creation of a nested set of opportunities for economic inclusion.
The process model we develop based on these findings illustrates the importance of the geography of resources, surfaces the role of places as platforms, and highlights the importance of temporality and nested opportunities in enabling local economic inclusion.