Introduction

This chapter seeks to explore the apparent contradiction between the global and the national, and the competing claims for the pre-eminence of each of these as analytical units through which to understand contemporary economic and organisational change, by focusing instead on one aspect of the local: the industrial district. The important spatial dimension to the industrial district concept, necessary to its very definition, provides us with a unique vantage point on this debate. If the local can be shown to matter to economic organisation, then where does that leave both the national and the global? By focusing on the importance of the regional we can see that neither the national nor the global can be considered complete analytical scales. The existence, survival, even proliferation, of districts and clusters would appear to throw down a challenge to these two competing narratives: that of the persistence of national systems as against that of globalising convergence. This challenge is real, and allows us to argue that a reinterpretation of the industrial district, both as a concrete phenomenon and as a theoretical construct, enables us to see more clearly how at one crucial (literal) site – the district itself – those forces contained within the SSD model intersect to produce complex and contingent outcomes that deny explanation in terms of either national systems or global-level forces.