ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to point out some hypotheses about the presence, the use and the features of networks within those complex forms of production organization defined as ‘industrial districts’ (IDs). According to Giacomo Becattini, one of the most important Italian scholars in Industrial Economics, ‘The industrial district is essentially a territorial system of small and medium-sized firms producing a group of commodities whose products are processes which can be split into different phases. Looking at the individual unit within the ID, the small single-phase, subcontractor enterprise – managed by one person, relying upon family resources both for labour and for capital and finance, requiring little or no innovation, technologically dependent, out of the control of the trade unions, and so on – is usually the ‘emblem’. Geographical proximity facilitates exchanges and contacts. Networks of producers develop primarily thanks to the fact of being in the same ‘place’.
