https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2507-1556
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ABSTRACT
Recent research has called for institutional approaches to help surpass the limitations of structural growth models in accounting for regionally specific development paths. The region of Heilbronn-Franconia in Baden-Württemberg is one such puzzling case for its economic and industrial structure is inconsistent with extant models, and yet the region represents one of the most prosperous economies with the highest concentration of hidden champions in Germany. This paper explores the institutions – patterns of social interactions and underlying beliefs – that characterize entrepreneurial practices on the levels of the firm, inter-firm and civic relations of this rural region. Based on a mixed-methods approach, including 132 interviews with managers and a survey of firms in strategic sectors, we unveil the interaction patterns of ‘life-long engagement’, ‘tinkering’, ‘doing’, ‘leadership networking’, and ‘civic engagement’ as well as the underlying beliefs that inform these patterns, as the institutions that are coherent with a particular mode of continuous innovation and entrepreneurial stamina. We conclude by proposing the hourglass model as the institutional morphology of rural industrialism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Germany is divided in to 96 planning regions (Raumordnungsregion), of which 18 are located in Bavaria and 12 in Baden-Württemberg (BBSR, Citation2019). Planning regions are administrative rather than political areas. They are larger in geographical size than NUTS-3 and smaller than NUTS-2-region and have been installed to facilitate statistical comparability of sub-regions between the federal states of Germany (BBSR, Citation2019).
2 These include Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Lower-Saxony.
3 Our calculations are based on the following data and measurements: Structural composition (sectoral and occupational) is calculated via a shift-share-analysis (total net shift) of employment data from 2007 to 2011. We used employment data (2013) to measure the regional sectoral and occupational coefficient of specialization (Hoover & Giarratani, Citation1984). We used an input-output-analysis [Euro] to calculate the trade-flow relatedness (Fan & Lang, Citation2000) in 2010. All employment data have been provided by the statistical service of the Federal Employment Agency, input-output-data by the Federal Statistical Office.
4 This paper adopts the definition of small and medium sized firms provided by the European Commission (Citation2015). SMEs have less than 250 employees and a maximum of €50 m in revenues (or a balance sheet total of maximum €43 m).
5 We obtained this observation through the following questionnaire item: ‘What external services have you used in the last five years? Please choose if you demanded it from suppliers within or/and outside the region’. We provided a selection of the following services: Tax consultancy, auditing, market research, legal consultancy, business consultancy, H&R, industrial design, engineering services, R&D, financial services, logistics, customer care, marketing, software adaption, data management, facility management.
