IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijgsbu/v4y2011i2p191-205.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An insight into the fragmentation of small firms under global competition in a machinery industrial district

Author

Listed:
  • Marzia Freo
  • Andrea Guizzardi
  • Giorgio Tassinari

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the impact of outsourcing, vertical disintegration and globalisation on the organisation and industrial relations of small district enterprises. In contrast to the extant literature, the focus is on subcontractors rather than on outsourcers. The study exploits a new source of fiscal data and places attention on the machinery sector of Emilia–Romagna, whose heterogeneity is disentangled by grouping enterprises into homogeneous clusters according to the length of their production processes and outsourcing propensities. The changes that have occurred in industrial organisation are evaluated by means of a comparison with the structure of the Emilian model in the 1980, as described by Brusco (1982). With respect to the dualism between small firms acting mainly as subcontractors and large firms directly accessing the market, a further segment composed of small-sized enterprises that simultaneously play the role of local supply chain leaders and subcontractors for large globalised companies is retrieved.

Suggested Citation

  • Marzia Freo & Andrea Guizzardi & Giorgio Tassinari, 2011. "An insight into the fragmentation of small firms under global competition in a machinery industrial district," International Journal of Globalisation and Small Business, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 4(2), pages 191-205.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijgsbu:v:4:y:2011:i:2:p:191-205
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=42253
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijgsbu:v:4:y:2011:i:2:p:191-205. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=37 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.