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

Abstract

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.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Rethinking Regional Path Dependence: Beyond Lock‐in to Evolution

“…But in later stages, different negative lock‐in processes increasingly offset the positive ones and hinder the continued growth and development of the industry, causing it to lose competitiveness and to go into relative or even absolute decline. While such a conception of lock‐in is nonequilibrist and obviously resonates with, and lends itself to ready integration into, standard life cycle–type models of industrial evolution (see Popp and Wilson 2007, for example), it fails to allow for a richer repertoire of path‐dependent evolutionary possibilities. Such a repertoire requires an alternative conceptualization of path dependence.…”

Cluster and business performance: Historical evidence from the Portuguese cork industry

“…To sum up, the clustering process is influenced by multiple path dependences, based not only on Marshallian external economies, but also on specific experiences of local firms in learning and innovation, as well as the interaction between the ID and its environment (contingency) and the choices of the relevant actors (agency). Popp and Wilson (2007) propose a nondeterministic lifecycle model along these lines and emphasise the importance of an inductive, narrative driven historical approach to fully understand the evolution of clusters in a long period of time.…”

Gouvernance et trajectoire des pôles de compétitivité

“…Pourtant, certains acteurs sont susceptibles de mettre en oeuvre des manoeuvres stratégiques pour modifier la trajectoire des réseaux, en raison notamment, de l'insatisfaction quant à la trajectoire attendue ou envisagée (Llobrera et al 2000). Les acteurs cherchent alors à valoriser les ressources existantes, à les réorganiser ou à en créer de nouvelles dans le cadre d'un processus rationnel (Popp et Wilson, 2007 ;Belussi et al, 2008). L'intervention des acteurs dans les bifurcations de trajectoires oscille sur un continuum allant de l'absence d'intervention (ou intervention minimale et individuelle), à une intervention massive et coordonnée (Llobrera et al, 2000).…”