Research On The Upgrade Of Industry Clusters: Based On An Analysis Of The Evolution Of Social Networks

With the globalization of economy, many local industry clusters are gradually embedded in the global value chains, but at the same time, these clusters are confronted with embarrassing situations for the lack of the self-innovation. This has made the upgrade research of industry clusters become a project of great emergency and practical significance.Current researches on how to upgrade industry clusters are based on the theory of global value chains. The theory takes cluster as its basic analyzing unit, and it derives the industry clusters'upgrading approach through an analysis of the global value chains'driving patterns and the patterns of relationship among firms and associated institutions in the cluster. However, this theory takes too much concern on the relationship between industry clusters and the global value chains and neglects the interior relationship of industry clusters. So these researches cannot explore the interior driving force of industry clusters'upgrade.The industrial cluster, as a method of organizing production between the market and the enterprises, is defined as a network of proximate firms and associated institutions, linked by traded interdependence and un-traded interdependence around a core activity. Judging from the perspective of structure, the industrial cluster is a kind of social network. In this article, this social network is properly extended. It not only includes the firms or institutions located in the industry clusters, but also comprises the firms or institutions outside the industry clusters but belonging to the global value chains that these clusters are embedded in. Based on the extension, the external relationship and internal relationship of industry clusters are embraced in the social network. Thus, the upgrade of industry clusters driven by the growth of enterprises corresponds to the evolving process of social network driven by the actors. A theoretical framework of the research on the upgrade of the industry clusters is built through analyzing the interaction between actors and networks. The research framework is composed of two parts. The first part is a static analysis on the interaction of actors and social network. It draws relative factors of the interaction of actors and social network, from the levels of the location of actors in the network, the dyadic relationship among actors, and the structure of the network in which the actors are located. The second part is a dynamic analysis on the interaction of actors and social network. This analysis constructs the evolving model of social network, based on Continuous-time Markov Chain. In the model, the behavior of actors reflects the adjustment for their own network relationship. The speed of the adjustment is dependent upon the evaluation from the actors of the current network relationship. The direction of the adjustment is dependent upon utility estimation from the actors of...