Making Money, (Re)Making Firms: Microbusiness Financial Networks in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter

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. In this paper I address the neglect of the financial elements of production networks by exploring the geographies of some of the financial practices of a group of microbusinesses 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 spatiotemporal financial relationships with suppliers, customers, and financial intermediaries. By contrast with the undersocialised 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.