Cultural Embeddedness To Cluster Firm's Innovative Capability:Effect Mechanism And Co-evolution

In different cultural contexts, why capacities of different firms and clusters vary largely? And why some clusters can gain sustainable development, while others may be gradually going to decline?In order to answer these questions, I review theories of embeddedness, culture embeddedness, cluster learning and innovation, and cluster evolution based upon neo economic sociology theory, innovation theory, culture theory and knowledge based theory. After that, I conduct a grounded research of four typical clusters (i.e., Shaoxing, Wenzhou, Yongkang and Haining), and refine six characteristics and two dimensions of culture embeddedness. Moreover, I integrate theoretical deduction and practical induction to propose my theoretical model and hypotheses. To test my theory, I collect 160 questionnaires from two typical culsters, namely Shaoxing cluster and Wenzhou cluster. After ANOVA analysis, correlation analysis, descriptive analysis, regression analysis, I test how embeddedness depth and embeddedness breadth influence explorative innovation and exploitive innovation. Finally,I conduct a longitudinal case study of Shaoxing County Textile Cluster during the last three decades to explore dynamic evolution feature of cultural embeddedness and the coevolution of cultural embeddedness and industrial cluster's development.My main results have important research implications.(1) Using grounded theory analysis, after cross-level and multi-dimension analysis of cultural embeddedness, I purify six typical characteristics of this cluster's culture, and unfold two dimensions of cultural embeddedness, namely, embeddedness depth (i.e. impact extent of a specific content of the regional cultural) and embeddedness breadth (i.e. consistency extent with the regional culture as a whole). Moreover, I develop a measure scale of cultural embeddedness. These findings are pioneering work for future economic geography research.(2) After integrating theoretical deduction and practical induction, I analyze how embeddedness depth and embeddedness breadth joint effect cluster's innovation capability. From the static functional perspective, culture embeddedness influence innovation capabilities of different firms in clusters through knowledge network structures and external learning behaviors so as to influence the innovation capabilities of clusters. Different culture characteristics of clusters have different effects on knowledge network structures and external learning behaviors. Thus we should consider all of the characteristics when facing the problems of how embeddedness depth and embeddedness breadth influence firm's innovation capabilities, while only considering one or several dimensions may lead to wrong conclusions. These findings are largely complement to extant theories of culture embeddedness.(3) From the dynamic process perspective, I conduct a longitudinal case study of Shaoxing County Textile Cluster during the last three decades. The results indicate that culture embeddedness can influence the network structures and behaviors of firms in a cluster, so as to promote the development and innovation capability of the cluster. In terms of dynamic perspective, the change of behavior, network structure, capability and performance may probably yield positive and negative feedback to culture embeddedness, so that the coevolution effects emerge, which includes the enhancement or decrease of culture embeddedness depth and breadth, over-embeddedness or non-embeddedness, and further coupling or lock-in. Actually, coevolutionary process leads to coupling in the early period of cluster's life cycle, but results in lock-in during the later phases, namely, the decline of a cluster seems to be caused by the same factors that were advantages in the past. These findings are meaningful to understand cultural motives of how a cluster develops and why different paths and performances emerge in terms of their cultures.