Value Adding Webs and Clusters

This book series on research in international human resource management and strategy is designed to stimulate discussions on current developments in these disciplines. The scope of this series reflects the importance of the fields of strat-egy and human resource management in the international environment of a globalised world. Both fields have the potential to contribute essentially to the description and explanation of competitive advantage realisation, performance issues and to achieving other corporate goals and objectives. Therefore, these areas need attention in research as well as in practice. This series will focus on the latest research results in this field. This volume consists of concepts and cases from research in the field of industry clusters by different authors. The aim of this book is to undertake an in-depth exploration of the topic of industry clustering from both management and policy perspectives. The book examines clustering from the standpoint of the single firm in the cluster and, in so doing, derives a novel formulation of clusters as comprising single firms with surround-ing concomitant chains of relationships with suppliers, other similar firms and, institutions of government and its agencies. Because of the resources that then can be attributed to firms within the cluster, the resultant conceptualisation of industry clusters is called value adding webs. It is contended that these then develop as a series of overlapping value adding webs forming an industry clus-ter. The concept is elaborated and applied to different cluster cases in this book.