Internationale Messeveranstaltungen als Brücken zwischen lokaler Produktion und globalem Wettbewerb. Eine Betrachtung temporärer räumlicher Nähe aus wirtschaftsgeographischer Perspektive anhand internationaler (Leit-) Messeveranstaltungen in Deutschland.

International trade fairs bring together agents from all over the world for a limited time period and create temporary spaces for presentation and interaction. Within specific institutional settings, participants not only acquire knowledge through face-to-face (F2F) communication with other agents, they also obtain information by observing and systematically monitoring other participants. Temporary face-to-face contact and the physical co-presence of global communities at these events establish a particular information and communication ecology, referred to as “global buzz”. Global buzz is extremely important for agents participating in these events as it generates access to developments occurring in different parts of the world. It helps to maintain and intensify existing networks, establish new networks and “trans-local pipelines”, and support the development of shared attitudes and understandings. This dissertation aims to provide empirical evidence about the significance of global buzz in its manifold forms. It analyses practices of global buzz empirically drawing from more than 460 semi-structured interviews, which were conducted between 2004 and 2006 at seven national and international trade fairs in Frankfurt/Main, Hannover and Nürnberg, Germany. The paper argues that practices of acquiring information, networking and dealing with competition differ substantially according to industries, firm and product characteristics. It analyzes the constituting components of global buzz and dismantles the complexity of this phenomenon in a multi-dimensional way. Participants at international trade fairs benefit from intensified decentralized knowledge flows in the form of learning by interacting and learning by observation. As such, these events establish central nodes in the global economy. International trade fairs have become important expressions of new geographies of circulation through which knowledge is created and exchanged at a distance.