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Abstract:
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The many competing schools of thought concerning themselves with industrial clusters have at
least one thing in common: they all agree that clusters are real life phenomena characterized by
the co-localization of separate economic entities, which are in some sense related, but not joined
together by any common ownership or management. So hierarchies they are certainly not.
Yet, it is usually taken for granted that clusters, almost regardless of how they are defined, all
expatriate the 'swollen middle' of various hybrid 'forms of long-term contracting, reciprocal
trading, regulation, franchising and the like' residing somewhere between hierarchies and
markets. This fundamental (but usually implicit) assumption would, perhaps, be justified if
markets could be reduced to events of exchange of property rights, between large numbers of
price-taking anonymous buyers and sellers supplied with perfect information as they are
commonly conceived in mainstream economics. One of the original attractions of Neoclassical
price theory was precisely that it promised a way of analysing the economy in general and
market exchange in particular independently of specific institutional settings.
However, introducing transaction costs as more than fees paid to intermediaries leads inevitably
to comparative institutional analysis and, not to be forgotten, to the perception of markets as
institutions with specific characteristics of their own. Some sets of characteristics are so common
that they represent a specific market organization or market form. The cluster is one such
specific market organization that is structured along territorial lines because this enables the
building of a set of institutions that are helpful in conducting certain kinds of economic
activities. |
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