Jennifer Clark '95, an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, has co-written (with Susan Christopherson) the book Remaking Regional Economies: Power, Labor, and Firm Strategies in the Knowledge Economy (Routledge, 2008). Clark's book reexamines the concept of the region, which since the early 1980s has been central to thinking about the emerging character of the global economy. In fields as diverse as business management, industrial relations, economic geography, sociology, and planning, the regional scale has emerged as an organizing concept for interpretations of economic change.

The study is both a critique of the "new regionalism" and a return to the "regional question" including all of its concerns with equity and uneven development. It challenges researchers and students to consider the region as a central scale of action in the global economy. At the core of the book are case studies of two industries that rely on skilled, innovative, and flexible workers - the optics and imaging industry and the film and television industry. The authors conducted intensive research on photonics and entertainment media firms, both large and small, which leads them to question some basic assumptions behind the new regionalism and to develop an alternative framework for understanding regional economic development policy.