Narratives as a coordinating device for reversing regional disequilibrium

Paul Collier and David Tuckett

Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2021, vol. 37, issue 1, 97-112

Abstract: Substantial differences in productivity, accompanied by growing social and political discontent, have widened across UK regions in the last 40 years, creating a dysfunctional spatial equilibrium; a coordination failure that has so far proved resistant to change. In this paper, we link such persistent regional disequilibria with current socio-psychological theories about the role of narrative in decision-making under radical uncertainty to explore how and why ideas held collectively within a social network can become the coordinating device for a range of decisions within networked communities that have extra-market effects (externalities), analogous to the role that prices play within markets. Drawing on findings from a pilot interview study in two UK regions, we show the potential for local leadership to use well-constructed narratives to coordinate fragmented agents to cooperate on a common purpose and more generally propose a framework to understand how low-income equilibria become stable but might be re-set. In this way we bring new insights into the need for an expanded economic theory of knowledge applicable to expectation and preference formation in conditions of radical uncertainty.

Keywords: narratives; decisions under uncertainty; leadership; common purpose; theory of knowledge in expectation formation; regional divergence; Wales; West Midlands (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/graa060 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:oxford:v:37:y:2021:i:1:p:97-112.

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy is currently edited by Christopher Adam

More articles in Oxford Review of Economic Policy from Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().