During the last decade, Chinese shan-zhai mobile phones have steadily and deliberately evolved from an informal economy to a formal one. We draw on institutional entrepreneurship to study this evolution, focusing in particular on how informal Chinese entrepreneurs pursued change and the transition to a formal economy. We emphasize three strategies-framing, aggregating, and bridging-Chinese entrepreneurs employed to mobilize support, garner resources, and increase their amount and level of legitimacy. We also discuss implications for research on informal economies and institutional entrepreneurship.

We discuss how global production networks interact with local institutions to shape the ways in which economic development occurs within a region; the region concerned being the Suzhou municipality in China. We argue that the development of Suzhou's information-technology industry has largely resulted from (1) the transformation of global production networks in the 1990s, in which Taiwanese firms played an important role; (2) the local states' active role in transforming local institutions to fit the needs of foreign firms; and (3) Taiwanese investors' engagement in mediating and transplanting related institutions into the locality to meet the demand of global logistics for speed and flexibility. All these have resulted in Suzhou municipality's rapid growth in the information-technology industry and its embeddedness in the fusion of the global and local contexts. However, we will also demonstrate that the power asymmetry of global players and local states in this area has resulted in the creation of industrial clusters that are institutionally embedded but technologically delinked from the localities.

The 'evolutionary turn' in economic geography has led to increasing emphasis on coevolution among technologies, organizations and territories. The weakness of this approach, however, is a focus on broad coevolutionary pictures that pays little attention to coordination processes that guide interdependent actions on the ground. Using the Taiwanese information technology industry as an example, this article suggests an industrial system analysis that gives a structural coherence to a series of intentional, collective actions. Such a systemic measure has the potential to extend the evolutionary analysis beyond broad coevolutions to the strategic transformations of industrial organizations.

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