Towards a comprehensive agency-based resilience approach: Myopia and hypermetropia in the Turkish wine industry

The Turkish wine industry presents an interesting case to explore firm behaviour, institutions and regional economic resilience. With political Islam gaining popularity over the past two decades, the local industry has faced many challenges at the policy level. These include an enormous tax burden, bans on alcohol advertising, promotion and sponsorship, and the prohibition on online sales of alcoholic products. Under these conditions, many producers do not have the necessary skills to manoeuvre institutional challenges therefore economic survival mainly depends on local agents’ own capabilities. Understanding the resilience of an industry as such calls for an institutionally nuanced and agent-centric micro-level focus. In this context, the paper seeks to establish a theoretical framework that facilitates an explanation of how agents’ inherent systematic anomalies, biases and spatio-temporal cognitive limitations restrict their resilience and the twin notions of myopia and hypermetropia serve as the basis for our argument. The producer firms of the Thrace wine-making cluster in the northwest corner of Türkiye constitute our empirical focus. Our findings illustrate that the impact of adverse sectoral policies on local firms are heterogeneous and that there exists at least three types of winemaking firms in Türkiye depending on their agendas and cognitive (dis)abilities.