IVS Seminar

Seminar with
Elodie Loubaresse, PhD student at Paris II University, France.

Network brokers in local productive networks: a comparative analysis of French packaging networks.

Abstract:

Building on industrial districts and cluster success, local firm networks have now been used in France as a public policy tool for a decade. The major policy labels are the ‘Local Productive Systems’ and the ‘Competitiveness Clusters’, both managed by dedicated ‘animation structures’, linked to various local public partners.

To tackle the local network management theme, I mobilize the concept of network broker (Snow, Miles and Coleman, 1992; Human and Provan, 2000). I would like to illustrate that network broker should no longer be considered as a black box. Its functioning and characteristics, in terms of composition or governance for instance, should therefore be considered as far as network evolution is concerned, as network broker embeddedness or governance seem to influence broker action.

The empirical part of my PhD dissertation consists in three qualitative case studies of French local networks from the packaging industry, in a comparative purpose.

I will give an overview of my three cases and expose the analysis in terms of embeddedness I proposed from my first case study.

Paper: The paper for the seminar is available for download here.