Making Money, (Re)Making Firms: Micro-Business Financial Networks in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter

Abstract

Although economic-geographical research has recently been the subject of ‘cultural’, ‘institutional’ and ‘relational’ turns that stress the situated, relational and embedded nature of economic activity, these concerns are usually elaborated through analyses of industrial, not financial, circuits of capital. This paper addresses the neglect of the financial elements of production networks by exploring the geographies of some of the financial practices of a group of micro-businesses in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. I argue that the Jewellery Quarter is an important financial space for these firms and illustrate how their production regimes are produced and reproduced through different spatio-temporal financial relationships with suppliers, customers and financial intermediaries. By contrast with the under-socialised treatments of agency that predominate in firm finance literatures in economics and finance, I illustrate the situated, idiosyncratic, and often very personal nature of the financial knowledges, practices and networks that reproduce these firms. This financial ‘cut’ through the Jewellery Quarter treats firm finances as integral to firm behaviours and strategy and uses this vantage point to assess the potentials and predicaments facing these firms that are regarded as strategically important for the future of the Quarter.

Keywords: Financial networks, jewellery, Birmingham

JEL Classification: 016,017,018