‘An Indissoluble Mutual Destiny’: The North Staffordshire Potteries and the Limits of Regional Trade Associationalism

Popp, Andrew

doi:10.1177/0170840605059159

Cited by 32 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…There were a few attempts in the 19th century to sponsor cooperation between factories. For example, the North Staffordshire Exchange first in 1859 and the North Staffordshire Chamber of Commerce again from 1875 to 1882 attempted to play a part in stabilising and unifying the highly fragmented and competitive market (Popp, 2003(Popp, , 2005. However, these attempts were often unsuccessful, because of the difficulty in regulating these firms, especially the smaller ones.…”

Section: Industrial Apprenticeship Rise and Fragmentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The historical shifts of in/formality of learning within craft skills ecosystems in the United Kingdom

Li,

Holstein,

Wedekind

2023

Int J Training Development

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In this paper, we address the debate on local skills ecosystems and informal learning. We use the social ecosystem model as a tool to help us analyse the role played by various actors in learning and skills ecosystems and highlight the role of informal learning in vocational education and training. We draw on the case of craft pottery to discuss the historical shifts and transformations of ecosystems, including the centrality of informal learning occurring in different spaces and times, and subsequent transformation of the learning ecosystem. Our paper contributes in two ways. First, we add the lens of temporality to understanding of how learning and skills ecosystems are maintained and developed, in the absence of supportive government policy. Second, we show how multiple horizontal sectors contribute to reconstruct a learning and skills ecosystem, as an informal one, over time.

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Section: Industrial Apprenticeship Rise and Fragmentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The historical shifts of in/formality of learning within craft skills ecosystems in the United Kingdom

Li,

Holstein,

Wedekind

2023

Int J Training Development

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“…Alternatively, where barriers to entry are low and rates of exit high, the resources thus released are often recycled only in new, larger waves of entry and in a similar position of structural overcrowding. Thus, mature districts may demonstrate high levels of internal competition and a breakdown in cooperative norms (Popp, 2005). Reintroducing technology as an issue, the coincidence of these points with similar moments in the product lifecycle may act particularly powerfully to frustrate change.…”

Section: Driversmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Trust had to be consciously engineered to overcome systemic and structural characteristics of the trade derived from clustering (Carnevali, 2003a). In the Potteries, faced with a very similar challenge, entrepreneurs were unable to achieve a similar resolution (Popp, 2005).…”

Section: Accommodationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life Cycles, Contingency, and Agency: Growth, Development, and Change in English Industrial Districts and Clusters

Popp

Wilson

2007

Environ Plan A

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Introduction: the value of historical perspectives Industrial districts have attracted increasing interest from scholars, policy makers, and the business community in recent years. While these socioeconomic^spatial phenomena appear to hold out an alluring promise of sustainable and equitable growth, several strands of research have argued that clustering is not always an unalloyed boon. In a recent special issue of Environment and Planning A, guest editors Hassink and Shin sought an advance in our understanding of the evolution of regions, clusters, and districts, and, in particular, of decline in mature systems. To that end, they and their contributors make the```lock-in' concept'', which they describe as``one of the few promising modern concepts'' with the potential to explain such phenomena, the``theoretical core'' of their programme (2005, page 571). At the same time, however, they also note the current weakness and fuzziness of the concept, resulting from its inductive origins and a lack of genuine comparative work. Chapman, in the same issue, suggests that a further cause of this weakness may stem from the fact that``much of the clusters discourse ... appears to lack historical perspective'' (2005, page 597). This seems surprising, however, given the sustained attention paid by economic and business historians to these issues (Wilson and Popp, 2003). In this paper we will present some of the fruits of that historical interest as they relate to the concerns central to the special issue.This common focus among the disciplines provides a strong justification for this paper. However, we also have reservations about aspects of the work conducted by geographers and presented in the special issue. These reservations hopefully provide the opportunity for a fruitful dialogue between economic geography and economic history. We will first outline some of our reservations before indicating the contribution that we believe a historical perspective can make to the lock-in concept and other, related debates within economic geography. As a statement of principle, we are concerned first and foremost with historical as well as with abstract time, with process, and with agency, defined as the extent to which actors are able both to make and to enact choices.Firstly, in terms of our response to the special issue, we have reservations about the presentation of the promising concept of contingency. Contingency in some of these studies appears as a form of deus ex machina that is exogenised and dehumanised.

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“…The fifth paper (Popp 2005), by Andrew Popp, conducts an historical analysis of the institution, and subsequent failure, of a regional trade association in the 'industrial district' of the north Staffordshire pottery industry, in England, in the later 19th century. It is a story of differences, in power, economic interests and cultural and political identity, between large incumbent firms, small incumbents and new entrants, and the role of individuals in establishing or blocking a regional trade association.…”

Section: Contributions To the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Dynamics of Interaction between Institutions, Markets and Organizations

Djelic

Nooteboom

Whitley

2005

Organization Studies

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Whereas the comparative business systems literature has studied how different national institutional settings encourage the development of different forms of economic organization, organization theory has tended to focus on the nature of different kinds of organizations and how these change, including vertical and horizontal alliances and networks of firms. Strategic management research, on the other hand, has concentrated on how firms develop different competences and strategies in different markets and competitive circumstances. The connections between these strands of research have, on the whole, remained quite limited. Studies of organization and strategy often neglected the role of institutions and national settings, while many studies of business systems have not considered the strategic behaviour of firms in the development of different kinds of economic coordination and control systems.One reason for the continued separation of these research approaches is their reflection of different disciplinary backgrounds, especially between those stemming from the economics of market structure and competition, the sociology of organization and networks and the sociology and political science of institutions and national settings. Economics has tended to emphasize demand conditions, market structure and competition, with notions such as economy of scale, entry barriers and differentiability of products explaining firm structure and behaviour. It has also often relied on functionalist accounts of economic organization, presuming that what survives is ipso facto efficient, as well as assuming ultra-rational owners and managers with perfect knowledge.In contrast, institutional analysis has highlighted the role of institutional arrangements governing the constitution of economic actors and their interactions, such as authority and trust norms, legal systems, state structures and policies, financial systems, the organization and hierarchy of professions and interest groups, skill-formation systems and the governance of labour markets. Many sociological approaches emphasize the importance of power relations, social conditioning, social capital and networks and social structures. Explanations in these two approaches invoke institutionalized expectations and rationalities as causal agencies in accounting for the ways that firms and other actors make sense of their situations and in deciding what to do, as well as more straightforward struggles over resources and control between groups with different capabilities and assets.

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‘An Indissoluble Mutual Destiny’: The North Staffordshire Potteries and the Limits of Regional Trade Associationalism

Cited by 32 publications

References 11 publications

The historical shifts of in/formality of learning within craft skills ecosystems in the United Kingdom

The historical shifts of in/formality of learning within craft skills ecosystems in the United Kingdom

Life Cycles, Contingency, and Agency: Growth, Development, and Change in English Industrial Districts and Clusters

Introduction: Dynamics of Interaction between Institutions, Markets and Organizations

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