IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-53761-4_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Transnational Entrepreneurs, Global Pipelines and Shifting Production Patterns: The Example of the Palanpuris in the Diamond Sector

In: The Global Diamond Industry

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Henn

    (University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario)

Abstract

Building on the buzz-and-pipelines model of regional clusters, the paper shows that transnational entrepreneurs play an important role in the construction of external cluster relations and hence influence both the dynamics of regional clusters and global production settings. Unlike most studies on the economic implications of transnational migrants, the paper deals with a labor intensive manufacturing sector. In detail, diamond dealers from the Indian city of Palanpur will be conceptualized as transnational entrepreneurs who, in the past, were able to cover certain locations of the diamond value added chain with family members. The global relations set up by these families at the same time formed business networks allowing for an intense global exchange of knowledge and artifacts (diamonds). In the long run, these patterns implied a change of the overall production structures: in Antwerp, a traditional diamond trading and cutting center, the Indian dealers developed to strong competitors in the smaller stones segment and as such contributed to the fading away of the historically grown industrial base. In addition, the institutional support structures were partly dismantled. On the other hand, in India, a new cluster in diamond cutting emerged. The findings suggest that transnational entrepreneurs can contribute to a weakening of traditional cluster structures and therefore call for a more differentiated view as evoked by the one-sided focus of studies on returnee migrants in the high-tech sector.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Henn, 2012. "Transnational Entrepreneurs, Global Pipelines and Shifting Production Patterns: The Example of the Palanpuris in the Diamond Sector," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Roman Grynberg & Letsema Mbayi (ed.), The Global Diamond Industry, chapter 3, pages 87-115, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-53761-4_4
    DOI: 10.1057/9781137537614_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Suwala Lech & Ahrens Jan-Philipp & Basco Rodrigo, 2024. "Family firms, hidden champions and regional development," ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, De Gruyter, vol. 68(1), pages 1-8.
    2. Harald Bathelt & Sebastian Henn, 2014. "The Geographies of Knowledge Transfers over Distance: Toward a Typology," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 46(6), pages 1403-1424, June.
    3. Bagci Utku Eren & Franz Martin & Yavan Nuri, 2022. "Ethnic networks in the internationalization of Turkish food producers," ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, De Gruyter, vol. 66(4), pages 201-210, November.
    4. Huasheng Zhu & Kelly Wanjing Chen & Juncheng Dai, 2016. "Beyond Apprenticeship: Knowledge Brokers and Sustainability of Apprentice-Based Clusters," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 8(12), pages 1-17, December.
    5. Rogerson Jayne M. & Mushawemhuka William J., 2015. "Transnational entrepreneurship in the Global South: evidence from Southern Africa," Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series, Sciendo, vol. 30(30), pages 135-146, December.
    6. Harald Bathelt & John A Cantwell & Ram Mudambi, 2018. "Overcoming frictions in transnational knowledge flows: challenges of connecting, sense-making and integrating," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 18(5), pages 1001-1022.
    7. Shayegheh Ashourizadeh & Jizhen Li & Kent Adsbøll Wickstrøm, 0. "Immigrants` Entrepreneurial Networks and Export: A Comparative Study," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 0, pages 1-28.
    8. Sandoz Laure & Mittmasser Christina & Riaño Yvonne & Piguet Etienne, 2022. "A Review of Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurship: Perspectives on Unequal Spatialities," ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, De Gruyter, vol. 66(3), pages 137-150, October.

    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:pal:palchp:978-1-137-53761-4_4. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    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.