ABSTRACT
It is nowadays more or less routine in the literature on industrial clusters to affirm that their form and functions depend on the differential articulation of three fundamental sets of ‘Marshallian’ variables, i.e., structures of inter-firm transacting, learning and innovation processes, and local labor market relationships. The first two of these sets of variables have been the objects of enormous and widespread research attention over the last couple of decades. The third, by contrast, has suffered from relative neglect. There is, to be sure, a scattered literature on the local labor market dimensions of industrial clusters (as the references at the end of the chapter attest), but nothing to compare with the massive attention that has been paid to the other two. In particular, the specific ways in which the operation of local labor markets can enhance the overall competitiveness of industrial clusters have been given rather short shrift in the literature, which is all the more to be regretted in view of what I take to be their absolutely critical role in sustaining high levels of performance in local economic systems. In the present chapter, I seek to redress some of his imbalance by means of an empirical examination of the local labor market dynamics of the Hollywood motion picture complex, with special emphasis on the notion of the ‘labor relation’ as an object of socio-economic regulation in geographic space, and specifically within clusters.
