Die-hard industrial clusters: resilience and knowledge network dynamics in Argentina

BALLAND, PIERRE A; GIULIANI, ELISA; ANDRÉS MATTA

Sydney

Congreso; APROS (Asia Pacific Researchers in Organization Studies and EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies) Conference; 2015

APROS Y EGOS

Most contemporary accounts of industrial clusters are about successful cases, and often investigate the reasons for their firms? superior international competitiveness, innovativeness and performance. Undoubtedly, the success of clusters is often ascribed to their firms? capacity to form dense networks, and to create a collective learning environment, where knowledge is shared and created by co-located firms. The cluster literature has tended to give significant consideration to the local institutional drivers of success ? not just to networks, but also to the functioning of local associations, public-private organizations, government support institutions, etc. (McEvily & Zaheer, 1999; Owen-Smith and Powell, 2004; McDermott et al., 2009). Moreover, scholars have emphasized the importance of leading firms or multinational corporations in the development trajectory of clusters (Iammarino and McCann, 2013). In contrast, research on less successful clusters, and on the reasons for their failure to compete internationally is scant.In this paper we contribute to fill this gap and discuss the case of a die-hard cluster ? i.e. an industrial cluster that has displayed significant resilience and has managed to survive, but it has failed to become an international champion. More specifically, we analyze the case of the electronics cluster in the Province of Cordoba, Argentina and trace its historical evolution since its inception at the beginning of the 1970s, to now. Over its entire history, the cluster has shown considerable resilience, as it has survived numerous external shocks due to, among others, abrupt changing of monetary, trade and industrial policies. This resilience is evidenced by the number of firms that populate the cluster, which, in spite of considerable fluctuations in the mid-1980s, persisted into the 1990s and then increased in the 2000s. Many Argentine analysts consider this resilience via survival a success in itself, which marks a difference with other industrial locations that have not survived external shocks. However, when observed from an international perspective, the cluster is, by most accounts, a story of failure. Hardly any international patent (either USPTO or EPO) comes from Cordoba, nor is any of the Cordoba electronics firms a leading actor in the world-wide electronics industry. Poor export and outward/inward Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) figures are also signals of the weak international competitiveness of the cluster.