In 1890 Alfred Marshall published his “Principles of Economics” in which he included a chapter on “industrial districts’', as he defined the geographic concentrations of specialised industries. After the Second World War the term “industrial district” has been applied to the emergence of economic specialisation in specific communities-in Italy, mostly in the northeast regions of the country. A century later from Marshall's book, Michael Porter's neo'Marshallian cluster concept has burst on the scene through a series of seminal articles. The book tracks the evolution of cluster theory from the perspective of the industrial economy to that of the knowledge society, and provides a discursive view of how entrepreneurs, policy makers and governments 'use' clusters today.