ABSTRACT
The economic literature has traditionally recognized advantages in the territorial agglomeration of firms (Marshall, 1890). From industrial district (ID) literature (Becattini, 1990), in the last decades several studies have shown companies belonging to an ID obtain greater levels of performance to those which, while belonging to the same industry, are located outside (Molina and Martínez, 2003; Ruiz-Ortega et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014). Recently, other approaches, such as the cluster life cycle theory (Menzel and Fornahl, 2010) and the adaptive cycles perspective (Martin and Sunley, 2011), have contributed to understanding the cluster’s evolution. These approaches have been of great interest in understanding the characteristics and the development of the clusters/districts. However, as different authors highlight (Belussi and Sedita, 2009; Hervás-Oliver and Albors-Garrigós, 2014), they have not addressed the heterogeneity of firms in IDs with respect to strategic behaviour, nor have they tried to explain what different roles companies adopt to interact and compete in the IDs, this being a crucial issue for a correct interpretation of the operation of the clusters. We consider that the configurational approach (Miller, 1996) provides an adequate explanation to this heterogeneity in the strategic behaviour of firms in the IDs and we propose to determine the organizational configurations (OCs) that are present in the IDs and the performance differences that there are between them.
