Estelle Vallier - Innovation in Clusters

The firm is, in the best of cases, considered as a network of individuals, or as being akin to an individual. We remain in a universe where the active force is the individual and where the collective is constructed or reduced to a set of relations between these individuals (Callon and Ferrary 2006, p. 39).

Further to the main distinction made by the proximity school between a geographical and organized dimension, Michel Grossetti and Olivier Bouba-Olga propose a new decomposition of socio-economic proximity by an approach at the level of individuals. They distinguish between two types of situations: proximity of resources and proximity of coordination, for which, first of all, resources are cognitive (“in the heads of the actors”), and they evoke a plethora of notions used in the social sciences to describe the behavior of actors from the inside: “strategies”, “dispositions”, “affects”, “habitus”, etc. The authors specify that these resources are shareable between them (language, values, standards) and can be mobilized to coordinate (Bouba-Olga and Grossetti 2010, p. 8). The resources are also material and social proximity is played out at the level of the resources possessed (assets, income, qualifications, social status, etc.). Alongside the proximity of resources, they mention the proximity of coordination, which is made up of both mediation mechanisms and social networks. They cite the often used example of the resources mobilized in the labor market: individuals rely as much on intermediaries (job applications, classified ads, recruitment agencies, etc.) as on personal relationship networks (word of mouth). Grossetti believes that these chains of interindividual relations are the most empirically founded of the various theories describing proximity effects (Grossetti 2004, p. 168). Indeed, many case studies highlight the existence of local interindividual social networks that cross organizational boundaries.

Another view also relies on the social capital of individuals but underlines the relations between individuals and the advantages created by the constitution of a network. A significant proportion of literature is based on the concept of embedding in the study of concentrations of industrial and/or scientific activities. This notion was developed by Granovetter in a celebrated article on the relations between principals and subcontractors in construction companies (Granovetter 1989). Within these interactions, he highlights the fact that the actors are personally involved in the economic relations they maintain. This personal dependence between individuals forms the notion of embeddedness. Relationships between enterprises cannot be understood without paying attention to the personal ties that unite the individuals involved in these interactions. Granovetter adheres to the tradition of social network analysis, which considers that interactions are the only acceptable starting point for sociological analysis. However, according to Grossetti, this approach tends to reduce economic activity to these sets of social relations (relational reductionism), when he considers that:

The social structure is not reducible to a network, it also includes groups (or circles, fields, worlds, etc.), in other words collective entities endowed with boundaries of name, affiliation procedures, etc (Grossetti 2006b, p. 85).

Consequently, alongside the notion of embedding, Grossetti and Bès use the notion of decoupling developed by Harrison White (1993). While he is one of the founders of the network approach, White also considers that it can easily lead to a naturalization of relationships, leaving aside other types of social structures: families, organizations, groups, etc. Therefore, embedding always refers to the dependence of an actor on the personal ties he has with others, and decoupling is, conversely, the self-nomination of this actor with respect to these relationships in a new embedding process. In this context, Grossetti and Bès speak rather of network dynamics in order to evoke the two complementary processes of embedding and decoupling. On the question of where relationships originate, Grossetti and Bès rely on the work of Claude Fischer (2011), who, based on an empirical study during the 1970s, tells us that most individuals meet through structures deemed stable and lasting (family, work, neighborhood, school) and that brief encounters in a bar or restaurant rarely convert into strong ties. Thus, when we look at the genesis of relationships, the notion of embedding works in reverse, with individual relationships embedded within collective structures. Nevertheless, they may become autonomous from those frameworks from which they originate, which is called decoupling. Grossetti and Bès indicate that this process “can be perfectly transposed to firms whose exchanges are initiated in a given framework (a “marketˮ) and can unfold in other frameworks” (Grossetti and Bès 2003, p. 53). There is an abundance of this literature on social networks in economics, sociology, management sciences, etc., which particularly feeds the concept of the cluster as a product and producer of informal exchanges conducive to innovation.

1 1 We recall that, in his study, Bagnasco emphasizes the structuring character of the Venetian parishes as places of information and exchange of know-how.

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