ABSTRACT
Employment and industrial change is solicited by factors of different origin that overlap, so no linear relation of cause and effect can clearly be indicated. Both the clothing industry of Teesside and especially of Brindisi are part of a flux of productive decentralization. The diverse nature of the production cycle in the chemical industry, an integrated process, makes the relevance of inter-firm relations less important in explaining redundancies in Teesside and Brindisi. The investigation of restructuring on Teesside and Brindisi has provided evidence of the role of institutional configuration on strategies of adjustment. As widely stressed, the clothing industries of Teesside and Brindisi are being exposed to international competitive pressures. The genesis of the industry in the hands of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) created the conditions for particular capital and labour relations to be established. The corporate culture established by ICI on Teesside provides a good explanation of the way in which institutions and space are inseparably interwoven.
