关键词: 地方生产网络, 空间结构, 演化机制, 社会网络分析方法

Abstract:

Economic geographers have recently attempted to develop relational and evolutionary economic geographies. Production networks and network evolution are both popular in economic geographies. Local production network is a valuable tool by which we can have a better understanding of the global-local interaction. Now the research on local production networks is moving from relatively static analysis to historical and dynamic process study. But there is little writing about the evolution of local production network in the context of China. This article tries to full this gap and takes textile and apparel industry in Chaoshan Region as a case to explore the processes and dynamics of production networks in the context of China’s transition to market-oriented economy. Here social interview is employed as a research method, based on the Ucinet software data. The result indicates that the internal structure of production networks in Chaoshan’s textile and apparel industry has changed from the geographical concentration of enterprises to multi-clusters networks and then to cross-clusters production networks. This change can be well explained by the basic concepts of Evolutionary Economic Geography such as selection, retention, variation and path dependence and path creation. Network evolution is in nature relational evolution between enterprises which were influenced by external environments and different development phases. Some mechanisms including geographical proximity of spin-offs, aggregation economy of enterprise in related industries and relational dependence together make the whole local production network be relatively stable structure of the internal network, which can be called “retention”. However, market and institutional innovation and path destruction induce structural change, leading to the gradual formation of cross-clusters production networks, which can be called “variation”. Finally, this article strongly argues that the evolutionary thinking is helpful in explaining the evolution of local production networks and the evolutionary study of local production networks would offer insightful suggestions for policy-makers. Interaction of cross-border production networks and institutional innovation would be the important research topics of network evolution in the near future.

Key words: local production networks, spatial structure, evolutionary dynamics, social network analysis