ABSTRACT
The analyses of competitiveness presented by Porter (1990) and the OECD's innovation researchers (OECD/TEP 1991, 1992), and the theorists of industrial districts (Becattini 1989, 1990; Nadvi/Schmitz 1994; Pyke 1990) are marked by a basic pattern of argumentation that sets them off against both neoliberal and traditional structuralist concepts: the studies in question aim on the one hand at not restricting the discussion of international competitiveness solely to the firm level. They focus on the development of the competitive power of national economies and/or regional industrial locations that cannot be grasped as a simple aggregation of the positions assumed by individual firms in international markets. On the other hand, and in contrast to static textbook models, in their studies they go beyond the given factors and structures of comparative advantages and disadvantages and focus specifically on the development and dynamization of such determinants of competitiveness. The learning processes of the actors and institutions involved, concealed as they are behind the structure, are made into the subject of analysis. This perspective obviates any one-dimensional explanatory approaches, pointing instead to the complexity of determinants of international competitiveness, the interactions of which constitute a multidimensional system. Orientations hitherto understood as opposites are seen as structural characteristics of the “new paradigm”: competition and cooperation (between firms as well as between institutions); globalization of the economy, and a new look at the role of regional or even local policies in improving locational quality; strengthening market forces (even within firms; see the establishment of profit centers) and politically governed coordination processes geared to improving external economies and shaping locational policies.
