温州鞋革产业中小企业集群创新系统基于CSP模型的分析英文翻译
Competition and Cooperation in Industrial Cluster: The Implication for Public Policy

David Newlands
English
European Planning Studies, Vol.11, No.5(2003)

2. Industrial Clusters: A Critical Reading of Different Theories
2.1Standard Agglomeration Theory, From Marshall Onwards
Marshall, in his writings on Sheffield, Lancashire and other British regions, viewed the main source of external economies as the ‘commons’, the infrastructure and other services from which each individual firm in an industrial district might draw (Marshall, 1921). Examples include, in modern terminology, improved job search and job matching, more favorable access to capital finance and inter-firm labor migration. The availability of such common resources to a number of firms then enhances their size and diversity as both capital and labor are attracted to such areas to exploit the larger markets for their services. This in turn leads to reductions in factor prices and/or increases in factor productivities. These are the ways in which the external benefit to firms of a location in the industrial district manifests itself. Unit production costs will be lower within the industrial district than out with it.
Parallel to his studies of industrial organization, in the various editions of his Principles of Economics, Marshall (1890, 1920) helped develop what was to become standard agglomeration theory. This was then built upon subsequently by a number of writers. For example, Scitovsky (1954) identified a further category of ‘pecuniary external economies’, Perroux (1955) contributed his famous theory of growth poles, and Chinitz (1961) applied the notion of agglomeration economies to the economic development of New York and Pittsburgh. More recently, Krugman (1991, 1995) has emphasized the importance of increasing returns as a favorable condition for the development of external economies. Porter (1990) can also be understood as belonging to this lineage in the sense that external economies make up many of the key relationships within his famous ‘diamond’.
Standard agglomeration theory provides an explanation of why firms might cluster together, sharing a ‘commons’ of business services and a diversified labour force, and forming extensive local linkages with other firms. However, it conforms to neo-classical theory in that local economies are viewed as collections of atomistic businesses, aware of one another solely through the intermediation of price/cost signals. Firms continue to compete with each other although Marshall was keen to warn of the risks that firms’ collaboration, in the development of shared inputs, risked blunting competitive forces.
2.2 Transaction Costs: The ‘Californian School’
In the writings of the ‘Californian school’, the disintegration of productive systems leads to an increase in firms’ transaction costs (Scott & Storper, 1986; Scott, 1988; Storper, 1989). Changes in market and technological conditions have led to increased uncertainty and greater risks of over capacity (of labour and capital) and of being locked into redundant technologies.
The response of deepening the organizational division of labour leads to an increase in the number of formal market transactions external to the firm. There may also be an increase in the unpredictability and complexity of transactions. The costs of carrying out certain types of transaction—especially those where tacit knowledge is important or trust is required and thus complete contracting is impossible—varies systematically with distance. Thus, agglomeration is the result of the minimization of these types of transactions costs in a situation where such minimization outweighs other production cost differentials.
The Californian school sought to explain observed agglomerations of economic activity. The argument centered on the localization of traded interdependencies—or simple input–output relations—but this is at best only a partial explanation, not least in being unable to distinguish convincingly between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ agglomerations. Agglomerations have been found in high wage, technologically advanced industries and low wage technologically stagnant ones alike while there are technologically dynamic agglomerations which lack the dense inter-firm linkages and coordinating institutions of a ‘new industrial district’.
Nor is it clear whether markets will succeed in coordinating transactions within clusters (Cooke & Morgan, 1993). The management of traded interdependencies is exactly what we think of as the business of markets but there may nevertheless be market failure. Thus, certain “transactions—in labor markets, in inter-firm relations, in innovation and knowledge development—tended to have points of failure in the absence of appropriate institutions” (Storper,1995, p. 199). With this concern for the institutional arrangements within clusters, the ‘Californian school’ came to share certain of the arguments of the flexible specialization theorists who are discussed next and the institutional and evolutionary economists who are considered shortly.
2.3 Flexible Specialization, Trust and Untraded Interdependencies
While neo-classical economics views firms as atomistic businesses, aware of one another only through formal market signals, modern industrial district theory emphasizes the interdependence of firms, flexible firm boundaries, and the importance of trust in creating and sustaining collaboration between economic actors within the districts.
These themes arose first in the literature on flexible specialization in the ‘Third Italy’(Brusco, 1982) but was later extended to Baden-Wu¨rtemberg and other regions (Piore & Sabel, 1984). The sources of flexibility lay in collaborative networks of (mostly) small firms and supporting institutions. These networks permitted the establishment of trust between actors, a crucial argument within most contemporary approaches to clusters. The reasoning is that firms within networks of trust benefit from the reciprocal exchange of information—particularly tacit information that cannot be codified—but are simultaneously bound by ties of obligation which regulate behavior. Trust thus reinforces mutually beneficial relationships between firms. The implicit assumption is that trust is more likely to be sustained in geographically concentrated networks than more dispersed ones (Belussi, 1996).
Firms may cooperate in seeking to get new work and may bid together on large projects. They may form consortia to access cheaper finance. They may jointly purchase materials and conduct or commission joint research. They may plan together and receive technical, financial and other services from the ‘commons’. However, despite all these examples of cooperative relationships, founded on or reinforced by trust, because they remain privately owned businesses, firms within clusters continue to compete, with one another and with other firms, often more on quality than price.
The embedding of economic relations into a wider social framework appears to be most common where business activity is conditioned by local politics, religion and close kinship and friendship relationships. Thus, “it is probably not a coincidence that the most successful districts have tended to be the most racially and culturally homogeneous” (Harrison, 1992, p. 479). Equally, national (or other broader) economic, legal and policy traditions are relevant. The development of inter-firm cooperation is more likely in some countries, such as Italy, than in others, such as the UK, because of differences in the operation of labor markets and competition policy.
According to theorists such as Granovetter (1985), trust arises from the ‘digestion’ of experience. Trust accumulates from repeated interactions between firms and other actors in which they contract and recontract, formally and informally, strike deals, and help each other out at times of crisis. Trust results from a process of learning through experience which actors can be relied upon. Personal contact facilitates such repeated interactions and this in turn is likely to depend on proximity. This focus on untraded interdependencies is very different to the transactions costs approach to agglomeration. The latter concerns the cost minimization of traded relations while untraded interdependencies point to wider processes of the optimization of non-market or non-contract exchanges (Raco, 1999).
Finally, it is important to note that untraded interdependencies can not only facilitate effective collective learning and action but also impede it. Especially where familiar conventions become well established, ‘sclerosis’ can set in. Areas can become locked into outdated and inferior technologies and institutions.
2.4 Innovative Milieux: The GREMI Group
There have been various schools of thought on the relationship between innovation, high technology industry and regional development. One line of enquiry has focused on the conditions for the establishment and growth of such high technology complexes as Silicon Valley and Route 128. While many factors have been identified, the most discussed is the role of local research intensive universities, Stanford in the case of Silicon Valley and MIT in the708

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