Resilience and the role of arts and culture-based activities in mature industrial districts

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we build on the results of previous research on how industrial districts (IDs) well-endowed with innovation capabilities fall into decline, and sometimes react against it. Major challenges may bring about deep crises. In particular, mature IDs stuck into the cognitive core and the institutional frames, which have featured their past growth, have often weak or slow reactions to such crises, demonstrating lack of adaptability and low resilience. However, lock-ins can be avoided or overcome by the activation and integration of a multiplicity of secondary know-how nuclei. The present paper combines some conceptualizations on such ID dynamics with the roles of their cultural backgrounds, and the possible activation of place-based arts and culture-based activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural heritage
• mature industrial district
• lock-in
• resilience
• cultural enhancement of local development

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank editors Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti, and the anonymous reviewer, for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper, and Dimitri Storai for discussion in the early design phase.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As Marshall wrote ‘the past lives on for ages after it has been lost from memory: and the most progressive peoples retain much of the substance of earlier habits of associated action in industry and in trade’ (Marshall, 1919, p. 6).

2. Becattini started with a paper in 1979 the reintroduction of the concept of ID, recovering it from Alfred Marshall’s writings. The English version of this paper, and other related paper, are included in Becattini (2004).

3. An expression of such common heritage in an ID is what Marshall (1919) referred to as an ‘industrial atmosphere’, talking about skill development (contributing to personal and human capital). Other expressions concern trust and social credit (contributing to what is meant today as social capital), and the social support to entrepreneurial attitudes and self-help (nowadays, entrepreneurial capital). See Casson (2006).

4. Scott (1997), Cooke (2009), Santagata (2002) and Sacco et al. (2013).

5. See, for example, Cinti (2008, p. 88) for a review.

6. Including restoration, conservation, historical understanding and cultural mapping. See, for example, Fioravanti and Mecca (2011).

7. That is, collective processes of learning and knowledge generation. This is assimilated to the ‘doing, using and interacting-mode of learning’. See Jensen, Johnson, Lorenz, and Lundvall (2007).

8. Absorption means to avoid prolonged difficulties in terms of unemployment, negative business demography, falls in GDP, etc. See Martin and Sunley (2015).

9. Becattini introduced explicitly this concept in 1990. It is an ideal-typical form of ID, characterized by auto-reproductive processes concerning the local division of labour and the high levels of endogenous capitals, decentralization in business organization and local specialization in a specific industrial field. See Becattini (2004). Such a definition actually hosts lot of variations. See also Cooke (2009).

10. See, for example, the recent economic geography literature: Martin and Sunley (2015), Boschma (2015).

11. This not casually refers to Steindl (1952).

12. That is, strong ties, bridging ties and lack of structural holes characterize the network. See Granovetter (1973), Burt (1992) and McEvily and Zaheer (1999).

13. It is a question of both excessive cognitive proximity and lack of unexplored heterogeneity. The localized knowledge within each nucleus of know-how is not vivified by new combinatorial possibilities (Antonelli, 1999).

14. See Strambach and Klement (2012) about the role of institutional plasticity in regional industrial path and transitions.

15. This resounds Steindl on oligopolistic dominance as the result of maturity and bringing to stagnation. See Crespo, Suire, and Vicente (2014) and Hervas-Oliver and Albors-Garrigos (2014) on the constitution of closed-loop cognitive networks in clusters’ maturity phases.

16. The same Becattini (2004) suggests the importance of the polycentric characters in ID development.

17. The ‘steady state’ is a notion applied in the theory of economic growth (see, for example, Daly, 1973). In this paper, the steady state refers to a path of development that is driven by the continuous presence of a set of know-how nuclei within the ID cognitive core and supported by the constant relation with the local institutional and cultural frame. Actually, a more rigorous statement would refer to a system evolving within a constrained bundle of possible paths (Martin, 2010).

18. A possible measure of the quasi-steady state is presented in Santini (2016).

19. The maturity and resilience concepts are strongly related to the time frame which defines the granularity of the evolutionary analysis. A deeper analysis of the point is deferred.

20. This is quite close to the concept of related variety (Boschma, 2015), even if complementary multiciplity does not imply a strict distinction between Marshallian and Jacobian externalities.

21. Such effects may be stronger or weaker according also to the interferences of both the evolution of the technological paradigms to which the traditional core impinges and the local cycles in political leaderships, in turnover within entrepreneurs’ teams, in quality and intensity of migrations. Very important is also the influence of degrees of hierarchy and openness (Crespo et al., 2014) within and between networks of the traditional technological gatekeepers of the main cluster and networks of the agents who potentially bring or promote novelties (Hervas-Oliver & Albors-Garrigos, 2014).

22. On redundancy and adaptability, see Grabher (1993). Bellandi (1996) and (2011) apply concepts on redundancy and local leadership to replacement multiplicity mechanisms in IDs and the organization of discontinuous change.

23. See examples in many chapters of Becattini, Bellandi, and De Propris (2009), in particular in Sections 1, 5, 7, 8 and 10.

24. The Slow Food movement originated in Bra, a town of the Langhe and Roero food district in Piedmont (Italy), is a good example. This movement arose from small producers of typical artisanal foods, reacting against the globalist social and organizational culture of industrialized food products. A non-profit organization Slow Food, operating as an information organizer, promotes events and enters the media industry founding a publishing company (Nosi & Zanni, 2004).

25. Outside Italy, consider as an example, the case of cultural strategies recently applied to support the social identity and the economic recovery of the Jewellery Quarter of Birmingham, a type of industrial district in the past centuries. The City Council, with the support of other institutional agents, prepared an image appraisal and a management plan for promoting the ‘Regeneration through Conservation’ of an area recognized as a national treasure, a place of unique character (Birmingham City Council, 2002).

26. Of course, regional and national regulatory and fiscal frameworks influence local welfare’s activities and outcomes (Trigilia, 2001).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the EU under H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project ‘MAKERS: Smart Manufacturing for EU Growth and Prosperity’, grant agreement no. [691192].