Enterprise Network, The Ability Of Enterprises And Firms In Cluster Upgrade: Theoretical Analysis And Empirical Research

With the accelerating pace of economic globalization, the role which developing country firms play in international labour division system has been fundamentally changed, more and more developing country firms are incorporated into global production and supply networks. However, despite they are not mainly playing a role as a raw material supplier any more, the situation developing country firms facing has not impoved as expected, some of them are even getting worse than before. As a result, how to effectively improve developing country firms' international competitiveness under the circumstances of economic globalization, becomes a hot topic which government officials, academies, and managers are all concerned about.Global value chain, industrial cluster, and firm's capabilities are three important theoretical frameworks applied to analyese developing country firm's competitiveness. eventhough each framework emphasizes the different aspects of the problem, they have a common goal to discover the mechanisms underlying developing country firm's cometitiveness, and explore the path to effectively improve it. This common research goal, plus the complementary analytic levels and compatible theoretical foundations among the different frameworks, make researchers try to integrate these theoretical frameworks in different ways, and expect this integration may provide thorough and deep understanding to developing country firms' dilemma.Based on this, this dissertation tries to propose and solve two theoretical questions: the first, whether these three theories can be integrated into one framework? the second, if it is true that upgrading is the only way for developing country firms to improve theire competitiness, what role will the firm's inner factors play in this process? This dissertation combines theoretical analysis with empirical study, aims to provide systematic answers to these two questions. The research works are foused on following aspects:(1) Building theoretical model based on literature analysis and field interviewThis dissertation reviews the extant academic literature of each theoretical framework, identifies the significant difference and complementariness or compatibleness among them. Based on literature review, theoretical deduction, and the field interview with business managers, this dissertation builds two theoretical models targeting clustered firms as analytic object, one is the capability building model of clustered firms from the networks perspective, and the other is the upgrading model of clustered firms from the perspective of capabilities. (2) Collecting data by questionnaire surveySupported by a national natural funds project and a project which funded by the Science and Technology bureau of Zhejiang provience, the author implemented a questionnaire survey in three exporting local clusters of Zhejiang province.with the help of other academic team members. The survey lasted From July to October 2006, data were collected from ZhuJi city, ShaoXing county and TaiZhou city. 412 questionnaires were handed out and 387 copies of valid questionnaire were returned.(3) Testing the validity of theoretical models by multivariate statistic method Based on clearly identified complementariness and compatibleness among theframeworks, using the data collect, the dissertation applied multivariate statistic methods such as factor analysis, variance analysis, and multivariate linear regression to test the hypotheses proposed by the two theoretical models. Six conclusions can be drawn from empirical analysis:①It is viable and valuable to integrate three theoretical frameworks, and further research is necessary;②Global knowledge transfer is an important source for clustered firms' capabilities building;③Collective efficiency in local networks is an important source for clustered firms' capabilities building;④Local government is an active actor in local networks, it impose significant influence on local firms' capabilities;⑤The network effects (both global and local) infuence local firms unevenly and selectively;⑥Clustered firms' capabilities are important influential factors for upgrading, but the mechanisms underlied may very complicated.This dissertation may contribute to the academic research as follows:(1) Building a clustered firms' capabilities building theoretical model from an enterprise networks perspective.This dissertation used knowledge transfer, technological learning and the accumulation of capabilities as ties to link the different frameworks. By exploring the relationships between global/local networks effects and the clustered firms' capability building, this model integrated the core elements of three different theories into one framework. To test the theoretical model's explantary power, the dissertation used data collected from local exporting firms to test the hypotheses, the empirical evidence provided powerful support to these hypotheses.(2) Building a clustered firms' upgrading theoretical model from a capabilities perspective.Neither global value chain analysis nor industrial cluster analysis pays much attention to the firm's inner factors which contribute to upgrading, this may be seen as a flaw of the two networks perspective. In order to make some mend for this flaw, this dissertation built a clustered firms' upgrading theoretical model from a capabilities perspective, based on global value chain, technological innovation and firm capability theory. By testing the relationship between capabilities and upgrading performance (product and process), this model is aimed to explore how significantly the inner factors (such as technological and marketing capablities) could influence local firms upgrading. The empirical evidence provided partial support for theoretical model.(3) Contributing to promote the global value chain and industrial cluster analysis extend to micro-firm level.The dissertation is not the first study which aims to integtate three different competitiveness frameworks, academies in both fields have realized the necessity to move further to the micro-analytic level. The way by which this dissertation built theoretical model may be taken as a reference for other similar research efforts.The integration process of three theoretical frameworks is just on its early phase, more works have to be done to complete the mission, this must be an challengeing but promising theoretical direction. This dissertation aims build theoretical links among different frameworks, but limited by the research ability of the author and the exploratory nature of the researh itself, there must be a lot of drawbacks in this work which need to be revised by further research.