ABSTRACT
Over the years clusters (defined by Porter, 2000: 16) as ‘a geographically proximate group of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and complementarities’) have become the target for policy makers and a key concept in supporting innovativeness and competitiveness initiated at several spatial levels (supranational, national, regional) (see, for instance, Porter, 2000; Asheim et al., 2006). Martin and Sunley (2003), however, are very critical about the ambiguities and identification problems surrounding the cluster concept. An important criticism of clusters concerns the fact that the literature strongly focuses on how clusters function, whereas their evolutionary development – i.e. how clusters actually become clusters, how and why they decline, and how they shift into new fields – is disregarded (Lorenzen, 2005; Staber, 2010). Examples of declining clusters illustrate that the economic advantages that stem from cluster dynamics are not permanent. In fact, the decline of clusters seems to be caused by factors that were advantages in the past (Martin and Sunley, 2006). The concept of political lock-ins in particular is promising, explaining the decline of mature production clusters. Political lock-ins, which will be described in Section 12.3, were introduced by Grabher (1993) in his studies on the Ruhr area in Germany. They can be considered as thick institutional tissues aiming at preserving existing industrial structures and therefore unnecessarily slowing down industrial restructuring and indirectly hampering the development of indigenous potential and creativity. The main aim of this chapter 1 is to define research gaps and derived from that research questions concerning political lock-ins (Section 12.4). Before that, in Section 12.2, lock-ins will be framed in broader discussions about cluster life cycles and cluster evolution, and there will be a review of literature on cluster decline and political lock-ins in Section 12.3.
