ABSTRACT
The textile-clothing industry is the most representative of traditional manufacturing and it illustrates the challenges this labour-intensive sector is currently facing in Europe, compounded by reduced average firm size, weak technological development and geographical concentration. Traditional manufacturing is a mature sector in Europe, facing reduced demand and low innovation levels, together with growing competition from low-labour-cost countries, which in the case of textile-clothing has been fostered by the liberalization of its world trade since 2005 in a general context of globalization. The textile-clothing industry is characterized by the frequent organization of its firms in geographical agglomerations in the search for external economies and production flexibility, of which the most well-known format is the territory known as the industrial district. The literature on industrial districts has highlighted their importance in the generation of external economies and competitive advantages for the firms locating there. The social and organizational characteristics of the district and its global orientation can help explain, to some extent, the managerial perceptions observed in the study carried out in the Comunidad Valenciana and analysed in Chapters 5 and 6. At the same time, the globalization process has been pointed out as a serious threat to industrial districts, to which they have responded with increased internationalization. The participation of district firms in international markets happens more through trade than through investment, both because most of them are SMEs and because the existence of the district is an incentive against the delocation of production. Most strategic recommendations usually made to traditional manufacturing firms are of a general nature, typically of diversification towards non-traditional manufacturing. However, the analysis carried out in this book shows that this general view is not always correct. It is necessary to take into account the participation or not in an industrial district and the particular traditional manufacturing subsector in which each firm operates, or its subsector of specialization. The analysis presented has identified the Alcoi-Ontinyent industrial district as the most important textile-clothing concentration in Spain, and has compared the firms located in that district to firms outside it, finding some heterogeneity in the participation and exploitation of territorial advantages. At the same time, that district is very specialized in home textiles, and in the work presented it is not
always possible to distinguish the results that are due to the district presence from those that are due to the specialization in home textiles. Nevertheless, the end result is that the strategic recommendations made to district firms that specialize in the district’s main activity (home textiles) may not necessarily be the same as those for firms outside that district or with different specializations. Moreover, the differences found with respect to managerial perceptions and internationalization can be explained to a large extent by the district location and the specialization in the district’s main activity.
