History, Technology Changes And Social Networks

In recent decades, there appears some industrial clustering phenomenons in theworldwide. As a new economic growth point, these industrial clusters play animportant role for the regional economic development. The industrial cluster is notonly a phenomenon of economic geography, but also a regional economicdevelopment model, and it has becoming a tool which been used for promotingeconomy by the governments and the economic organizations in the world. In China,there also appears some massive economic and industrial clusters in the southeastcoastal areas and other areas. In the period of China’s social transition, these industrialclusters usually located in the region which lacking of natural resources, the weakindustrial base, the disadvantage of spatial location, and not lacking national policysupports. So, how did these regions formed industrial clusters? Which conditions dothese regions have? What is the mechanism? This is the problem we will solve in thisessay.About the formation mechanism of industrial clusters, the western scholars havealready been researching earlier, and have been formed a number of classic literatureso far. These theories basically include: the market regulating mechanism, theinstitution promoting mechanism, and the embedding perspective. These threetheories respectively emphasized the role of competition in the market, the role ofstate or government system construction and industrial policy, the role of socialnetworks and social capital. They effectively explain the formation of the westerncountries’ industrial clusters. But, in explaining the formation of China’s socialtransformation in rural areas of the endogenous industrial clusters, they are lack ofsome validity. The article takes the embedding perspective, through constructing adynamic overlapping mechanism constituded by " History-Technical Changes-Social networks " to try to explain the endogenous industry cluster phenomenon ofChina. In fact, the formation of industrial clusters include three successive stages ofdevelopment, they are a initial stage, a rapid development stage, a formating stage.History, technological changes and social networks combined effect in each stage, but due to different factors play a key role and between them have a primary andsecondary points. With promoting industrial development stage, three factors alsoshowed a corresponding change dynamically. The three factors together closecollusion, indivisible, play an important role in the entire process of industry clusterformation.This article based on this interpretation mechanism, tries to analyze the formation ofMei town endogenous textile industrial cluster. Mei town endogenous textileindustrial cluster is divided into three stages: the initial stage is from1970to1995, therapid development stage is from1995to2000, the industrial cluster stage is after2000. Through specific combing every stage of development, especially foucusing onthe dynamic mechanism for each stage of development. The study found that theformation of Mei town textile industry cluster in addition to the influence of marketand national institutional environment, it is more profoundly influenced by thecombined effect of local history, technological change and social networks. In the Theinitial stage of industry, industrial history has played a more crucial role in givingpeople a sense of history about the textile industry and preference, and this is thereason why Mei town appearred textile and not others, through social networks,people found a certain production resources and achieved technology changes.Sothe textile industry is from the historlic consciousness to a reality, which also lay thefoundation for the development of the textile industry of Mei town. In the rapiddevelopment stage of industry, triggered wide loom technology that was transferredplays a key role for the formation of a textile industry in Mei town, which was causedby the Chinese textile industry reforms. The historical experience and social networksspeed up the technology’s wide diffusion in the Mei town, and reduced the uncertainty,so they played the rigidity of the wide loom technology. Thus, the Mei town textileindustry has some huge advantages of scale and competition. In the industrial clusterformation stage, the social networks plays a key role for the production resources’convergence to Mei town, and for forming a supporting cloth networks. The socialnetworks must be involved in the early practitioners’ historical experience and theirscontacts relation. Therefore, the author thinks that Meizhen’s endogenous textile industrial cluster isformed in the fluence by history, technological change and social networks conbinetogether. History is the dominant factor in the initial stage of industry. Technologicalchange is the dominant factor in the rapid development of the industry. Socialnetworks is the dominant factor in the formation of clusters. While the dominantfactors works, the other two factors also play a significant role, the three overlappingtogether to constitute a power source of textile industrial cluster in Mei town.