Global-local Nexus and Technological Learning in Industrial Cluster: A Case Study of Hair-goods Industry in Xuchang, Henan Province
全球-地方联结与产业集群的技术学习 ——以河南许昌发制品产业为例

Industrial clusters have become one of the most popular concepts in local and regional development research and practice not only in the more advanced countries but also in less-developed parts of the world. Since 1978, the great institutional transitions from the planned economy to the market economy and the speeding industrialization have inspired local clusters mushrooming in China. In this paper, drawing upon a global-local nexus perspective and deriving insights from the new regionalists on industrial districts, the regulationists on regulation approach and literature on Global Production Networks (GPN), the author tries to develop a broad conceptual framework, which focuses on the strategic coupling among social systems of production, institutes and regulation mechanisms, local production networks and global production networks, for understanding local cluster and learning industrial district. Using this framework, this paper presents a case study of the Xuchang hair-goods industry, an export-oriented local cluster in the middle Henan province of China, and explores the processes to make global-local nexus and their impacts on promoting restructuring and upgrading of traditional local clusters in China. The case study shows that the technological learning and industrial upgrading in those local clusters within the low road are likely to achieve, and the processes to approach the high road and learning industrial district depend on some critical dynamic factors such as the national institutional change and the active responses of local authorities and entrepreneurs, the relational networks embedded in local institutions and culture, and the extending of global production networks and the dynamic upgrading of global-local nexus. Therefore, developing learning industrial district should be an important strategy and policy to promote China's economic development and technological innovation.