As the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic prompts a new wave of calls from pundits for workers to “learn to code” and further efforts by local and state governments to attract high-tech employers by any means necessary, the critical perspectives provided by historical studies of the “idea economy” are vital. In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings makes an important contribution to this burgeoning literature by surveying the emergence and growth of technologically advanced enterprise in the triangle bounded by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill in North Carolina. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, when most southern locales still focused on luring conventional manufacturing away from what would soon become the Rust Belt with promises of low-wage labor, central North Carolina pursued a different developmentalist strategy, aspiring instead to appeal to both cutting-edge firms in fields such as computing and pharmaceuticals and the highly educated workforce needed to perform...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
September 01 2022
Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy
Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy
. Alex Sayf Cummings. New York
: Columbia University Press
, 2020
. xiv + 250 pp.; $120.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper); $29.99 (ebook).Labor (2022) 19 (3): 105–107.
Citation
Shannan Clark; Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy. Labor 1 September 2022; 19 (3): 105–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9795110
Download citation file:
Advertisement