Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
region into new markets. Weak cognitive and political lock-ins are testii ed by the early
mental and policy reorientation of the main regional actors towards supporting new
economic activities. This region has been going through 'quiet' restructuring processes,
which, in turn, led to renewal and a diversii cation of the production structure. Political
lock-ins and resistance to restructuring were weak in this region and closely related to
that, there tended to be little media and academic attention for its economic problems
(Hauf , 1991, 1995). Hauf (1991, p. 207), for instance, observed at the beginning of the
1980s, after the collapse of Van Delden, the largest textile i rm in the region:
In the wake of the Van Delden collapse, Gronau's unemployment rate was, in fact, higher than
that of any other urban community in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is, indeed, surprising that,
despite the tenseness of the job situation in and around Gronau, there were neither protest
movements, nor occupations of factories like those which had accompanied pit and steel clo-
sures in the more militant Ruhr.
This 'quiet' restructuring process and related weak regional lock-ins can be explained
by factors that are partly industrial and partly contextual in nature. With regard to the
i rst factor, relatively weak lock-ins can be explained by the specii c characteristics of the
textile industry, an industry with, in contrast to heavy industrial complexes, low entry
and exit barriers, relatively many small and medium-sized enterprises, strong competi-
tion and little inl uence of trade unions (Dicken, 2003). Furthermore, a number of spe-
cii c contextual factors can be observed in Westmünsterland that contributed to weak
lock-ins. First, the location of the region adjacent to the heavy industry complex of the
Ruhr area, within the political-administrative boundaries of one state (North Rhine-
Westphalia), led to little media attention and weakened the hopes of the main regional
actors to be able to successfully lobby the state government. Second, local cultural and
organizational factors, such as the reserved, down-to-earth and settled mentality of its
people and the patriarchal organization of family i rms (Hassink, 2007b), contributed to
weak lock-ins. Because of the weak lock-ins, the regional economy reoriented itself at an
early stage, which in turn led to a successful renewal.
The textile region of Daegu, South Korea
The textile industry cluster of Daegu, the third largest city in South Korea (see Figure
21.3), and the surrounding cities of Gumi and Gyeongnam, started to grow in the 1960s
(Cho and Hassink, 2009; Lee et al. 2000; Park, 1997). It is characterized by specializa-
tion in the production and weaving of chemical i bres and has been strongly focusing
on export. Textile business constitutes the largest segment of manufacturing in Daegu:
31.3 per cent of total establishment, 34.7 per cent of total employment; which means a
location quotient of 4.1, 34.6 per cent of total production, 54.2 per cent of total export
and 30.9 per cent of total value added in 2002 (Cho and Hassink, 2009). The high rate of
automation in the 1980s brought about problems of overcapacity and overproduction,
which in turn led to i nancial dii culties in the textile business. Moreover, textile com-
panies were faced with increasing competition from low-cost neighbouring countries,
China, in particular, and a shift of Korean producers to China in the 1990s. Forty years
of path-dependent evolution led to specialization in the narrow low value added and
low-tech middle stream of the textile value chain, whereas high value added and high-
tech downstream activities were nearly totally absent. The upshot of all this is that the
