ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to begin to develop an understanding of the processes involved in the restructuring of Rjukan, a company town in Norway. In a recently published study on new firm formation, small firm growth and regional development in Norway, Isaksen and Spilling (1996) have shown that the ratio of new firm formation to working population tends to be lowest in single industry towns. Importantly, the study concludes that the rate of new firm formation seems to be a function of a town's existing industrial structure. In other words, an economic structure is reproduced mainly through the creation of new businesses in the lines of already existing industries, and where large firms dominate few new firms are set up. It is argued here that traditional approaches to understanding economic change based on static analyses of production functions and factor inputs, only weakly explain this pattern of change. It is suggested, instead, that a dynamic approach to understanding value creation is more revealing, drawing on structuration theory and theories of 'learning' and knowledge production.
