Institutional Embeddedness and Regional Adaptability and Rigidity in a Chinese Apparel Cluster

Abstract

In recent years, the flexibilities industrial clusters may offer to firms within them have been questioned as inter‐firm linkages have, in some cases, locked‐in path‐dependent practices and increased economic rigidities. In this sense, the canonical path dependence model has tended to overlook such trajectories of cluster evolution and has not paid as much attention to the ways in which actors can affect path‐dependent processes. In this article, we build on this critique which has largely been developed in evolutionary economic geography to explore how a cluster becomes progressively locked‐in and how the knowledge base of an industry becomes homogenized, resulting in a loss of innovative dynamism and a slowdown in the growth, or even stasis, of the cluster. By focusing on a case study from China, the article investigates some of the ways in which different kinds of actors respond to external shocks, and the ways in which the resulting processes are fraught with tensions and divergences. In doing so, the article emphasizes that the association between trans‐local pipelines and innovation is not predetermined. The second theoretical contribution of this article lies in its attempt to reveal that all actors can be both path dependent and path breaking, and the process of co‐evolution can be driven by the heterogeneity and divergence of particular actors. Finally, we seek to contribute to existing literature by showing the potential advantages of working at the interface between evolutionary economic geography and other theoretical approaches.

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