Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
commerce supporting local management, training schemes and colleges devoted
to the local industry, clearing houses for information on markets, and the like,
can be part of such an environment.
The evidence so far
Firm structure, and still more, the arrangement of groups of firms, are seen to be
of importance in the production of many complex industrial products today.
Product cycles, or rather the superimposition of many product cycles on to one
another as innovations, are constantly spawned from major centres of industry,
and seem to indicate a continual “centre and periphery” kind of structure in
industrial development. But flexible production systems suggest that this may
not always be the case. In the first major example, flexible manufacturing with
high technology goods and computer-aided systems leads to a kind of diffuse
concentration near but not in the old centres of industry, as the us car industry
demonstrates. In the second model, flexible specialization allows distinctive
industrial centres to arise, even in areas of no great technological superiority,
when there are many firms working in a loose cooperative structure in the same
sector of industry. Such a structure may be developed in LDCS as well as
advanced countries.
Beyond all these patterns, the overriding tendency, carried forward from
previous phases of development, is for concentration of the assembly and
producing firms in an industrial district, a 'just in time' region, or more diffuse
spatial concentrations. Total diffusion out to unrelated regions, which might be in
contact with one another simply by modern electronic communications systems,
has not happened.
Some of the comments regarding Italy are intended as a warning about the
applicability of the model of flexibility as a universal saviour. There are
insufficient cases of flexible specialization to make a strong case in its favour to
date, and the existing cases are under pressure to change in various ways. It may
also be the case that excessive specialization itself could be a bad strategy for a
region to follow. There is a case for industrial regions with a wide diversity of
industries, even if some of them are poor performers at any one time. This is the
view of Grabher (1993), who pointed out that those regions that have specialized
heavily tend to be problem regions at a later date. This comment may extend to
types of firm or of organization. If there is a place for small and flexible
industries, there may also be a place for larger firms with global reach, and for
different kinds of linkage system between firms. This is part of the strength of
the traditional industrial regions like the southeast of England and Lombardy in
Italy (Amin & Thrift 1994).
This leads us to the second section of this chapter, on the phenomenon of
globalization.
