Exploring regional industrial culture. Changing industrial culture and human agency in a Norwegian region

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the role that industrial culture and human agency play in regional industrial development. It makes three contributions. First, it discusses and explores the concept of regional industrial culture and examines its relevance for regional industrial development. Second, it identifies and investigates two main forms of regional industrial culture: one self-interest dominated type and one community dominated type. Third, the paper discusses how firm – and system-level agencies can contribute to changing the dominant form of industrial culture at the regional level. The paper also provides a study of the regional industrial culture and change in the culture by key actors and agency in the Molde region in Western Norway since 2010. The empirical study demonstrates that the concepts of self-interest and community dominated culture and their link to firm – and system – level agency is relevant to capture and describe a regional industrial culture and potential changes within it. We found that the industrial cultural change in the Molde region could be regarded as mainly being the outcome of system level agency performed by both firm – and system – level actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional industrial culture
• human agency
• regional industrial development
• cluster project

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Source: Table 07984 in the Statistical bank, Statistics Norway

2 This argument was contested by Kenney and von Burg (1999), who argued that the different industrial development in the two regions results from their industrial specialities, the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley and the minicomputer industry in Route 128. The technological trajectories in these industries were different and led to the differential success of the two regions. Saxenian (1999) again claimed that a key point is to understand the mechanisms by which technological trajectories are established, and the culture and institutional environments that support collective learning and innovation within the trajectories.

3 Table 07984 in the Statistical Bank of Statistics Norway.

4 https://www.moldenf.no/om-molde-naeringsforum

5 See, https://www.protomore.no/ for more information

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Regional Research Fund Agder: [Grant Number Project no. 285529].