Michael Dunford is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Sussex. In 2000 he was elected member of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences (AcSS). In 1996-2002 he was Editor of Regional Studies. In 2003 he received the Royal Geographical Society Edward Heath Award for geographical research in Europe. He has held Visiting Professorships at the universities of Pavia, Toulouse, Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, Campinas in Brazil, Oslo and Sciences-Po in Paris. His previous publications include Cities and Regions in the New Europe (1992) and Successful European Regions: Northern Ireland Learning from Others (1996).

Lidia Greco is Lecturer in the Sociology of Economics and Labour Processes at the University of Bari, Italy. She previously worked at Trinity College, Dublin, where she carried out two EU-funded research projects. As a consultant, Lidia has worked for the University of Durham and the Sussex European Institute, and more recently for the European Union. She is the author of Industrial Redundancies: A Comparative Analysis of the Chemical and Clothing Industries in the UK and Italy (2002) and co-author of Building the European Research Area: European Socio-Economic Research in Practice (forthcoming).