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Abstract
In the midst of the widespread, long-term economic downturn throughout the Canadian manufacturing landscape, the contract (or office) furniture sector has demonstrated resilience and vibrancy. The study reported here investigated the institutional foundations of innovation and competitive advantage in this dynamic, design-led, export-oriented manufacturing sector. It connects to ongoing work in economic geography and the social sciences to enhance economic geographers’ understanding of the role of institutions in shaping the practices of firms and competitive outcomes and seeks to advance a more agency-centered institutionalist economic geography. The study focused on three dimensions of industrial practices: (1) the use of training and investments in technology, (2) the nature of employment relations, and (3) the use of design. The analysis reveals that the most globally competitive firms operating in a Canadian institutional context prosper by learning a set of production practices and the value of design-intensive products from the embodied knowledge of their founders, who have lived, studied and worked in high-wage, coordinated market economies of continental Europe. The ability of these entrepreneurs to transfer industrial knowledge from continental Europe to Canada has had direct benefits for learning and innovation processes that are critical to the synthetic knowledge base of this sector. The empirical analysis entails a sector wide survey questionnaire (N = 220) as well as 55 in-depth interviews with senior managers, production workers, and designers from a subset of leading firms.
Acknowledgments
The research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, whose support is gratefully acknowledged. I also thank Meric Gertler, Deborah Leslie, Jason Hackworth, Kathi Wilson, Tim Heinemann, Kate Geddie, and Jason Kovacs for their valuable input and insights; Tara Vinodrai for her contribution in developing the survey; Jennifer Shiller for her helpful assistance in facilitating the survey; and three anonymous reviewers. A version of this article was presented at the special session Manufacturing Capitalism: Adaptation, Survival, Resilience and New Geographies of Production at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Washington, D. C., 14–18 April, 2010, and was awarded the Best Graduate Student Research Proposal Award by the Economic Geography Specialty Group.
Notes
The CE sample included not only all firms whose founders originated in CE countries but also those who were educated or trained in these countries. The decision to organize the sample in this way was based on the hypothesis that those who studied in CE, while not having necessarily originated there, nevertheless had the opportunity to assimilate similar tacit (and explicit) knowledge of the manufacturing practices that predominate in such countries.
On the basis of a p value of .000 and a test statistic of 4.637, CE firms have a significantly higher percentage of skilled employees than do AA firms.
On the basis of a p value of .046, Mann-Whitney U tests revealed that CE firms train their semiskilled workers for a significantly longer period than do AA firms.
On the basis of a p value of .003, chi-square tests revealed that CE firms are significantly more flexible than are AA firms.
On the basis of a p value of .0385 and a test statistic of 1.826, AA firms lost a significantly higher number of workers to other firms from 2007 to 2009 than did CE firms.
Based on a p value of .006, chi-square tests revealed that CE firms were significantly more design intensive than were the AA firms.