Regional Industrial Identity: Cluster Configurations and Economic Development

Abstract

We explore the concept of regional industrial identity as an important missing component in our understanding of the development of metropolitan regions and the spatial arrangements of industries. While economists and sociologists have explained the location of industry clusters on the basis of unevenly distributed resources, and historians have provided rich descriptive insight into the developmental dynamics of particular metropolitan regions, little systematic theory has been advanced to explain cross-regional inflows and outflows of resources, especially with respect to patterns in cluster development. This paper examines the concept of regional industrial identity as a social code that (1) arises from the shared understandings of residents and external audiences about the suitability of a region for particular kinds of business activity and (2) influences decisions about where to locate investments. We argue that such understandings are principally informed by configurations of industry clusters that have already formed in a region. Clusters, which are the results of historical investments, are also important signals about the types of business that can thrive in the future. We develop theoretical propositions linking characteristics of regional industry cluster configurations, in particular cluster dominance and cluster interrelatedness, to the strength and focus of regional identity and, as a result, to the types and amounts of resources that will develop within and flow into and out of regions.

Corporate Philanthropic Responses to Emergent Human Needs: The Role of Organizational Attention Focus

“…Thus, resource flows across geographic space are not only a function of an organization's physical presence in a given location, but also of that location's prominence in the organization's attention hierarchy. Moreover, since geography not only distributes attention but is also an important element of an organization's identity (Glynn and Abzug 2002;McKendrick et al 2003;Romanelli and Khessina 2005), geographically defined attention patterns are likely to be relatively stable predictors of organizational resource allocation patterns (Bouquet and Birkinshaw 2008). In the context of our theorizing, we propose that the likelihood of philanthropic responses to emergent human needs in a particular geographic location is a function of the amount of attention an organization tends to pay to that location, and that these effects exist above and beyond the predictive effects of an organization's physical presence in that location.…”

Organizational Attributes and the Distribution of Rewards in a Region: Managerial Firms vs. Knowledge Clusters

“…This article expands the organization theory of regional industrial agglomerations (Chiles et al 2004, Romanelli andKhessina 2005) by discussing the economic effects of different organizational attributes at a regional level.…”

“…A taxonomy developed by Romanelli and Khessina (2005) proposes two central organizational attributes to classify regions from an economic point of view: (1) dominance and (2) interrelatedness. They apply these two dimensions to regional clusters.…”

“…Powell et al (1996) show that interfirm knowledge spillovers produced by firms in tight geographical boundaries are correlated with a significant overlap of the firms' final markets. This happens because firms tend to specialize within an industry that shares similar technologies and customers (Romanelli and Khessina 2005). Similarly, on many occasions the main competitors of incumbent firms are geographically bounded spin-offs that inherited competencies in the form of knowledge spillovers (Klepper 2002).…”

“…The literature analyzes industrial agglomerations from the perspectives of social networks (Sorenson 2003), the presence of spontaneous inputs (Chiles et al 2004), the effects of agglomeration economies (Krugman 1991), or the factors that shape industrial agglomeration as a long-term regional phenomenon, like the work on the identity of clusters by Romanelli and Khessina (2005). The empirical evidence is less extensive.…”