Industry Clusters in Ireland: An Application of Porter's Model of National Competitive Advantage to Three Sectors

This paper examines the importance of industrial clusters, and the relevance of Porter's diamond model, in the context of the small open economy of Ireland. It analyses the experience of three relatively successful Irish indigenous sectors and it considers to what extent have clusters of related or connected industries been important in accounting for the degree of success attained in Ireland. We do not find evidence of well-developed clusters of the type described by Porter, and our study provides support for some previous critiques of Porter's model. It is concluded that Irish industrial policy does not need to be focused strongly on developing the type of industry clusters described in Porter's model. At the same time, different elements of Porter's model do prove to be relevant and we find that companies in Ireland benefit from being part of some form of wider grouping of connected or related companies and industries, although these groupings can differ from Porter's clusters in significant respects.     

Normative,agitated, and rebellious femininities among East and Central African refugee women

This article discusses femininities among East and Central African refugee women self-settled in Nairobi, Kenya. It argues that while normative approaches to refugee studies depict a homogeneous refugee femininity inherently synonymous with vulnerability and ‘victimhood,’ femininity among refugee women in Nairobi is heterogeneous, fluid, and complex. It is premised on individual refugee women's marital statuses in relation to economic situation. The article argues that femininity is a constraint in some instances and a resource in others, such that what exists among the refugee women is not a single femininity but a continuum of femininities. Specifically, the article conceptualizes femininity under three categories, namely: normative, agitated, and rebellious femininities.     

Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous,Empty Communities in Contemporary Social Theory

What are the chronopolitics of global–local relations? This article reconsiders the oversymmetric portrayals of identity and nationalism in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, and reopens questions about chronopolitics raised by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other. Anderson relies heavily on Walter Benjamin, but seriously misunderstands him, in his portrayal of nations as parallel communities in ‘homogeneous, empty, time’. Against Anderson's premise that homogeneous, empty time is real, this article argues that calibrated asymmetries in global time were made real by colonial practices, that we have forgotten that glory and hierarchical self-assertion, not horizontal comradeship, were central to Europe's Rome-fantasizing imperial nations, and that élite diaspora have replaced imperial conquests precisely in the wake of decolonization and the rise of UN ideology.     

Workers,Unions and the State: Migrant Workers in China's Labour‐intensive Foreign Enterprises

Migrant workers present a new challenge both to China's increasingly diversified industrial relations and to its state–society relationship, especially vis‐à‐vis China's developmental state. Through an examination of the situation of migrant workers in the country's labour‐intensive foreign investment enterprises, this article argues that it is difficult to establish tripartite industrial relations in China and that pluralistic labour organizations will not easily develop into civil society type labour entities. China's developmental state is in an ambiguous process in redefining its role. Its ability to micro‐manage society is weakening substantially. However, its developmental character at the macro‐level largely remains strong, allowing it to continue to restrict progress towards civil society. The future will ultimately depend on a collective determination by key players — the workers, unions and the state — to find a compromise.     

Differentiated regional entrepreneurial discovery processes. A conceptual discussion and empirical illustration from three emergent clusters

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to contribute to better understanding of entrepreneurial discovery processes and regional industrial growth by examining (1) how different regional contexts affect entrepreneurial discoveries, and (2) how entrepreneurial discoveries support specific types of industrial path development in different regions. The paper includes empirical studies of the formation and growth of three ‘official’ regional clusters supported by Innovation Norway’s programme for immature clusters. The paper argues that entrepreneurial discoveries should be institutionalized (by system level entrepreneurs) to achieve considerable regional industrial effects. In our cases institutionalization occurs through the creation of cluster organizations and development of the knowledge infrastructure.     

农区产业集群、网络与中部崛起

我国中部六省地区由于多种原因在全国区域经济格局中已经成为了"经济增长速度的相对塌陷地区",实施"中部崛起"战略是学术界、中央和地方政府达成的共识。本文在分析中部地区存在问题的基础上提出,实施产业集群战略、创建本地企业网络是实现中部崛起的有效途径。发展农区产业集群可以提高集群企业和区域产业的竞争力,推动农村工业化和城镇化进程,促进县域经济的发展。而企业之间的网络联系是产业集群的本质特征,培育产业集群必须从创建企业网络入手。最后,本文对如何在中部农区培育产业集群、创建企业网络作了探讨。     

Chronotopes of study abroad: the cultural Other,immersion, and compartmentalized space–time

Study abroad offers a specific configuration of encountering cultural Others: in a demarcated “abroad” space in a compartmentalized time period. Informed by Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes, this article investigates narratives of American college students who studied in Paris, France and Bilbao, Spain in June–July 2011 based on an ethnographic fieldwork of their stay. I identify two chronotopes held in tension in their narratives that reflect tenets of the discourse of immersion: of homogeneous space where every minute students spend in the host society is “local” time full of learning, which risks portraying the host society as frozen in the time of the students’ stay; and of heterogeneous space where local space–time and outsider (e.g. American students and tourists) space–time co-exist hierarchically, where students strive to show their engagement with the former. This article calls for encouraging students to examine the effects of these chronotopes on their experiences and for viewing study abroad not as an encounter of two cultures but as diverse students joining in the ongoing production of heterogeneous host society space with a compartmentalized yet expanding notion of time.     

产业集群理论的争论、困惑与评论

产业集群理论是近年来在学术界及政策界影响较大的理论之一。但产业集群理论仍是发展中的理论,在国外有很大的争论。本文介绍了西方学者对产业集群的争论,重点分析了产业集群空间界限及划分、产业集群与产业演化及区域发展、产业集群与全球化及产业政策方面存在的问题,在此基础上,进行了理论评述。     

FLEXIBLE SPECIALISATION AND SMALL FIRMS IN ITALY: MYTHS AND REALITIES

This paper offers a critical evaluation of the ‘Flexible Specialisation’ model which asserts that a new and dominant model of industrial organisation based upon craft principles is emerging, or can be nurtured in places where it does not yet exist. Drawing upon recent evidence from Italy, the country whose economic resurgence around small firms has become a cornerstone for the flexible specialisation thesis, the paper argues that there is little cause for the thesis's optimism for small flexible firms and their emancipatory role for the working class.     

Italian fashion: yesterday,today and tomorrow

The article considers Gianna Manzini's ‘La moda e una cosa seria’ (La Donna, 1935, July, 36–37) as a forerunner of current scholarly approaches to fashion in general and Italian fashion in particular, for three reasons. First, it asserts the importance of a gendered history of fashion; second, it argues for the importance of boundaries and lines of demarcation in the study of fashion that do not pertain solely to time but also to fields, disciplines and the other arts, as well as social and political domains; third, it raises the question of the relationship between fashion and nation. In examining how and when to establish the beginning or the origin of Italian fashion, the article argues for a long history of Italian fashion that stretches as far back as early modernity, thus reframing a number of historiographical questions. The article goes on to signal the difficulty involved in establishing neat points of ruptures and origins, and continuities in any historical or cultural spectrum in view of the porosity of national boundaries; and makes the case for considering fashion, both today's and that of yesteryear, in both its national and transnational dimensions.     

Profitability or Industrial Relations: What Explains Manufacturing Performance across Indian States?

This article begins with a critique of the well-known claim by Besley and Burgess concerning the negative impact of labour regulation on organized sector manufacturing performance in India. In the second part of the article, the authors use a state-level panel data set for the period 1969–2005 to analyse the relative importance of profitability (rate of profit as a percentage of the total replacement cost of capital stock) and industrial disputes (man-days lost to all industrial disputes as a percentage of total workers employed) to explain cross-state variations of manufacturing performance in India's organized sector. Using three different measures of manufacturing performance — net value added, investment and employment — they find that profitability is more significant than industrial disputes in explaining the variation of manufacturing sector performance across Indian states. The findings presented here therefore question the uncritical acceptance of Besley and Burgess's results in the literature on labour regulation.     

Lime Burning in Clamp Kilns in Scotland's Western Central Belt: Primitive Industry or Simple but Perfectly Adequate Technology?

Lime is a fundamental component in many industrial, agricultural and chemical processes, and is itself produced by an industrial process, namely, the heating in kilns (calcining, or more colloquially ‘burning’) of calcium carbonate rock or other carbonate material. Research and literature on lime burning in Scotland, based largely on lime production in Scotland's eastern Central Belt, are dominated by the view that lime burning in draw kilns is the paradigm for Scottish lime production. Other parts of Scotland, however, largely or completely ignored, draw kilns in favour of simpler clamp kilns, even in major industrial sites of lime production. This paper reports our map- and field-based surveys in Scotland's western Central Belt, which clearly point to the enduring importance and almost exclusive use of clamp kilns in that area's historical lime-burning industry.     

Russia and China: converging responses to globalization

This article compares the impact of globalization on the political systems and political economy of Russia and China since the beginning of their respective reform periods. Overall, it argues that both should now be viewed within the paradigm of ‘developmental states’. The article first presents some comparative economic statistics on the changes that have taken place. Second, it looks at the converging attitudes of the two regimes towards industrial restructuring and privatization, highlighting the continued role that they both reserve for state direction. This includes an orientation towards national industrial champions. Third, the evolution of policies of both states towards guided democratization are discussed leading to an assessment of the importance of nationalism in their responses to globalization, particularly in the recent doctrine of ‘sovereign democracy’ of Putin's United Russia party. Finally, the article argues that a greater wariness towards western recipes for political and economic development will frame the efforts of both states to construct a more cooperative bilateral relationship.     

Illegitimate birth and the English clergy, 1198-1348

This article studies illegitimacy, which was a canonical impediment to ordination, within the English clergy between 1198 and 1348. Scholarship on illegitimacy in the clergy has previously relied on canon law, conciliar decrees, and dispensations preserved in papal registers. Using these sources, historians have concluded that the papacy tightly controlled illegitimate men's access to orders, that the burdens of obtaining dispensations for illegitimacy (the defectus natalium) could pose substantial obstacles to a man's clerical career, and that priests' sons made up a significant percentage of the illegitimate clergy. This article, which draws on the large and previously untapped body of dispensations surviving in English episcopal registers to supplement the papal sources, reaches different conclusions. It argues that the great majority of illegitimate clerics in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English clergy were the sons of unmarried lay parents. It further argues that dispensations were more readily accessible than has previously been suggested, and emphasises the importance of local branches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to an individual's efforts to attain a dispensation to enter holy orders.     

New books: Publishers' announcements

This article studies illegitimacy, which was a canonical impediment to ordination, within the English clergy between 1198 and 1348. Scholarship on illegitimacy in the clergy has previously relied on canon law, conciliar decrees, and dispensations preserved in papal registers. Using these sources, historians have concluded that the papacy tightly controlled illegitimate men's access to orders, that the burdens of obtaining dispensations for illegitimacy (the defectus natalium) could pose substantial obstacles to a man's clerical career, and that priests' sons made up a significant percentage of the illegitimate clergy. This article, which draws on the large and previously untapped body of dispensations surviving in English episcopal registers to supplement the papal sources, reaches different conclusions. It argues that the great majority of illegitimate clerics in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English clergy were the sons of unmarried lay parents. It further argues that dispensations were more readily accessible than has previously been suggested, and emphasises the importance of local branches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to an individual's efforts to attain a dispensation to enter holy orders.     

Enterprise Clusters and Industrial Districts in Colombia's Fashion Sector†

This paper presents the theory of enterprise clusters and industrial districts, and contrasts it with the evidence of two productive agglomerations in the fashion sector in Colombia. The empirical evidence on Bucaramanga and Medellín, that host the largest groups of Colombian textile and clothing producers and exporters, is based on a survey questionnaire, carried out in November–December 1998. The results of the survey confirm the relevance of the Industrial district concept in understanding the recent developments of Colombia's textile and garments industry, and reveal the presence of some dimensions of an enterprise cluster in both Medellín and Bucaramanga, although each with different characteristics. However, both Colombian clusters are characterized by a low degree of firm–level specialization and poorly–developed enterprise networks. This is similar to what has been observed in most enterprise clusters in Latin America, and may clearly hinder the local external economies and collective efficiency. Backward linkages are poor or lacking in both clusters. The strategy prevailing in most enterprises has been the internalization of many stages of the productive process. Forward linkages are much stronger, and the retailers play a crucial role in the commercial phases. However, only Bucaramanga firms have entered global production and marketing networks, whereas Medellín firms are mainly oriented to the national market. Moreover, the two clusters have developed under very different economic policy regimes, and this had had its consequences on the clusters' performance and structure.     

Heroic Power in Thomas Carlyle and Leo Tolstoy

This paper explores two opposed paradigmatic approaches to heroic power: Thomas Carlyle's versus Leo Tolstoy's. In On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), Carlyle argues for its crucial importance, whereas in War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy denies its very possibility. Carlyle's heroic model attributes to the hero (the leader) a high degree of mastery and control over social and political circumstances, whereas Tolstoy's a-heroic model implies a small degree of personal mastery and much greater constraints on the individual leader. Both models achieved prominence in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, which brought the role of the individual (hero) in history to the forefront of intellectual and political debate throughout Europe. The two models are shown as parts of and important links in long-established traditions; they are internally coherent yet totally contradictory of each other. The comparison of these opposed perceptions of heroic figures in history suggests that they might originate in an ambivalent, polarized perception of power and mastery, and in the sense of individual insecurity in the face of historical upheavals.     

The Re-emergence of a Media Industry Cluster in Leipzig

This paper begins with the proposition that an analysis of the potentialities of industrial networks has to consider the wider context of the social organization of production. Recent work on industrial clustering has shown that successful clusters are embedded in tight networks of social relations between suppliers, producers, customers and institutions. Localized capabilities, such as specialized resources and skills, conventions and other local institutional structures, provide the basis for inter-firm cooperation. Based on Malmberg and Maskell's (2001) conceptualization of localized industrial clusters, I discuss the horizontal, vertical and institutional cluster dimensions as a basis for empirical analysis. In addition, attention will be drawn to the external dimension and power relations of a cluster which have a strong impact on its growth trajectory. This conceptualization is used as a basis for studying the new Leipzig media industry cluster. Leipzig, which is located in the Neue Länder (States of the former German Democratic Republic), has traditionally been a major centre of industrial production in Germany. After the German unification, a significant proportion of Leipzig's manufacturing activities were terminated or downsized. Interestingly, a new media cluster has developed during the 1990s, driven by the activities of the MDR (Middle German Television and Broadcasting Service). This has stimulated substantial start-up activities in branches of the media industry, such as film/TV production, new electronic services/interactive media, graphics/design, PR/marketing and media-related hardware/software. Being virtually the only sector which has grown in recent years, the media sector has stabilized the local economy. In this paper, I investigate those forces which have supported start-up and location decisions of media firms and the role of local institutions and policy programmes in the clustering process.     

Marring the Memory: The 1967 Vimy Ridge Commemorations and Canada-France Relations

Commemorating Canada's legendary April 1917 battle of Vimy Ridge has normally proven an emotive event of national importance, symbolic of shared Canadian and French wartime trials and given mostly to remembrance of Canada's war dead. Since 1936, the ridge has been graced by the massive Canadian National Vimy Memorial, for decades the site of impressive and solemn annual ceremonies. But Canada's 1967 50th anniversary celebrations of the battle – a showpiece of the national centenary celebrations – became mired in controversy. French President General Charles de Gaulle was deeply offended that Canada had invited Prince Philip to the event without consulting Paris. It was a stunning diplomatic blunder, especially since Canada's relations with France already were tense as a result of de Gaulle's tacit support for the cause of Quebec independence. Consequently, an opportunity to commemorate a signal event in Canadian history devolved into a fractious bilateral debate and led to a shocking and much-deplored French boycott of the ceremonies. This article adds to the history of commemoration as foreign policy and argues that the Vimy incident had major consequences on France–Canada relations and played a role in France's growing encouragement of Quebec separatists.     

External Ties and the Reduction of Knowledge Asymmetries among Clusters within Global Value Chains: The Case of the Ceramic Tile District of Castellon

Classical industrial districts' literature is not focused on the role played by external ties but gives more importance to the local districts' endogenous development. Global value chains connect clusters to other external agents through external linkages and constitute a framework to analyse the complex inter-linkages between clusters and other external agents. In the field of the external ties and the global value chain approach Academia is primarily focused on the ties which link clusters in developing nations to global markets, although global value chains also consider connections between clusters in similar activities and even when both are located in developed nations. Thus, external linkages are mainly performed by multinational enterprise (MNE) affiliates which play fundamental role of knowledge diffusers and absorbers in the process of knowledge exchange throughout global value chains. The work examines the process of knowledge exchange between clusters through external ties using the global value chain approach. For this purpose, empirical work is conducted with 22 face-to-face interviews to provide a case study about a leading cluster in the global ceramic tile industry. Results show that the basic knowledge to successfully compete is locally originated, although it can be complemented with global knowledge learnt or generated in other territories. MNE affiliates bridge structural holes through external ties and reduce knowledge asymmetries within global value chains. External ties on network-based governance chains exist, matter and affect clusters allowing upgrading even between developed nations.