Industry Clusters & GVCs: Frameworks to Study Textiles

As the complexity of the textile industry has increased because of international regulations, advancements in technology, and resultant globalization, so too have the frameworks and theories used to explain these phenomena and how firms and countries can succeed within these new parameters of competition. Recently two schools of thought have been used to study the industrial organization patterns and strategic decisions of participants in the textile complex that have fundamentally altered previous ideologies on what connects people, places, and firm. Value chain scholars attest that to study today's global industries requires a network-based approach capable of ranging multiple spatial scales while elucidating the dynamic relationships between them. Industry cluster researchers emphasize the increasing importance of location and institutional actors to increase competitiveness that cannot be accessed from a distance. This article reviews the conceptual ideas that preceded these two frameworks leading up to the divergence in thinking around the turn of the twenty-first century with industry clusters and global value chains, and showcasing two examples that have merged aspects of these two frameworks to build a stronger framework to analyze the textile complex. This article appears in the Journal of the Textile Institute, 100(8), p. 668-681.