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In memoriam: Professor Yves Cherruault
Edited by Gaspar Mora
1 Introduction
[37] Porter (1998) proposed that today's economic map of the world is dominated by clusters: geographic concentrations of linked businesses that enjoy unusual competitive success in their field. Currently, the globalization of economy and the ease of transportation and communication have led many companies to move some or all of their operations to locations with low wages, taxes, and utility costs. For stable labor-intensive activities such as manufacturing assembly and software localization, low factor costs are often decisive in driving location choices. In the context, China becomes the dominant makers of steel, coke, aluminum, cement, chemicals, leather, and other goods, which drives the rapid growth of its economy in recent years. Some well-known industrial clusters have earned a certain reputation in the world, such as textile and clothing cluster in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, and electronic products manufacturing cluster in Dongguan, Guangdong Province.
Clusters can be seen as exhibiting three key characteristics: physical proximity, core competencies, and relationships. Clusters present opportunities for an organization to streamline and shorten its supply chain, as those partners and related resources exist in a concentrated area. The firms which operate in a cluster can take the advantage of scalability without dealing with the inflexibilities of vertical integration or formal linkages. Compared with dispersed and random buyers and sellers, cluster members often do businesses in one location, which can facilitate exchanges, boost competition, improve innovation, and build mutual trusts. In nations such as Germany, Italy, India, and the USA, the development of industrial clusters has played and still plays a very important role in fueling their productivity growth and honing their ability to compete effectively in the global area ([7] Brenner, 2005; [3] Antoldi, 2006; [6] Biswas et al. , 2007; [45] DeWitt et al. , 2006).
However, China's industrial cluster is still in its initial stage, and faces some critical problems now. Many cluster members are only geographically concentrated, while their managers cannot demonstrate the advantages of virtual organizational alliance fully (interrelated, interdependent, and specialized division of labor). Their competitive advantage mainly relies on cheap labor and high consumption of natural resources. Most export-oriented clusters in developing countries like China, Viet Nam, Philippines, and Malaysia, only occupy the lower-value...