Global sourcing shifts in the U.S. textile and apparel industry: a cluster analysis

Globalization of the U.S. textile and apparel industry has been significantly spurred in the last decade by trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). In terms of the U.S. textile and apparel manufacturers and retailers, the competitive pressure from markets and consumers has forced many firms to rely increasingly on global sourcing to sustain competitiveness. In the last decade, U.S. textile and apparel manufacturers and retailers have been actively involved in global sourcing to find suppliers who could meet the criteria of low cost, high quality, reliable delivery, quick response time, and flexibility. The purpose of this study is to investigate the changes in U.S. global sourcing patterns for yarn, fabric, and apparel. Cluster analysis is used to analyze trade data in 1993 and 2002 in order to investigate the patterns of U.S. global sourcing of textile and apparel products.Results indicate that U.S. textiles and apparel sourcing patterns have shifted, with a substantially increased emphasis on apparel imports from Mexico and the CBI countries in 2002 as compared to imports from mainland China and Hong Kong in 1993. Sourcing patterns of yarn and fabric indicate that Mexico upgraded its place in U.S. imports of yarn and fabric in 2002. In addition, further longitudinal analysis of U.S. apparel imports from mainland China, Hong Kong, CBI countries, and Mexico, which were the major players in the U.S. global sourcing of apparel, shows that there was a dynamic change in the status of these four regions in terms of their respective percentage shares in U.S. apparel sourcing. The paper concludes that the U.S. textile and apparel global sourcing patterns in last decade reflect the dramatic changes in the competitive and dynamic global textile and apparel business environment. Global sourcing is indeed a fine-tuning business strategy that requires balanced and comprehensive consideration of economic, trade, environmental, and competitive factors

Changing nature and sustainability of the industrial district model : the case of Technic Valley in France

This paper examines the impact of contemporary pressures on industrial districts and analyses the changes that are taking place in an industrial district confronted with disembedding and globalization. We discuss the following questions: what are the processes and consequences of disembedding for the changing shape and form of inter-firm trust, contract and network forms? Is there an evolution in subcontracting and trade interdependency? What is the role of institutional infrastructures? We performed a longitudinal qualitative study using a number of different data sources to analyse the evolution of one French industrial district, particularly how new pressures of internationalization and disembedding work to reconfigure inter-firm relations in this district. While the recent literature is dominated by notions about industrial districts that concern only the trend towards increased competition or disembeddedness, this article shows that there is no unilinear trend. In contrast with the findings of certain recent studies, we argue that economic logic does not fully account for recent developments since the adjustment that are being made by the district are characterized rather by re-embeddedness, increased cooperation and institutionalization.industrial district, globalization, economic sociology

Transaction Costs and Outsourcing Decisions in Small and Medium-Sized Family Firms

An important difference between family and nonfamily firms, and among different types of family firms, is in the way they make outsourcing decisions and thereby define the boundaries of the firm. The authors propose that transaction costs arising from human asset specificity, threats of opportunism, and risk aversion will make small- and medium-sized family firms operating with technologies of low to medium complexity less likely to outsource than comparable nonfamily firms. The authors also argue that the limiting influence of transaction costs on the outsourcing decisions of family firms may be mitigated by variations in available suppliers, goals, and ownership structures

Assessing the importance of market risk and its sources in SMEs of the Visegrad group and Serbia

The main goal of the paper is to assess the market risk sources of small and medium-sized enterprises in the V4 and Serbia according to the business environment of the countries analyzed. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire-based survey was carried out involving 1,905 small and medium-sized enterprises in these countries. Market risk sources include: losing customers, strong competition in the area of business, stagnation of the market, and unreliability of suppliers. Mathematical statistics tools (PivotTables, Relative Frequency, goodness of fit and Z-Score) were used to compare the evaluation of selected market risk sources. According to the entrepreneurs' evaluation, the partial results of this research show that the most serious source of market risk is losing customers (22%). The country of operation of the entrepreneurs is a statistically significant factor when evaluating all sources of risk. There are statistically significant differences between entrepreneurs in the countries analyzed when evaluating - the high and very high intensity of - the following market risk sources: "losing customers", "stagnation of the market" and "unreliability of suppliers". © 2018 Hindawi Limited. All rights reserved

The Rise or the Fall of International Law?

This Article argues that traditional international law is healthy in the sense that there are more international agreements than ever, and States continue to serve important roles in the international system. It is falling, however, as the sole focus of international legal efforts. It is necessary to redefine international law to include actors other than States among those who make international norms and who implement and comply with them, and to include legal instruments that may not be formally binding. These developments raise three important issues: the need for the new actors to be accountable and for the new norms to be legitimate; the need for consensus about the level or location of authority, be it international, national, subnational, or non-State, at which norms should be negotiated; and the rising need for international law to reflect commonly held values to keep the increasingly fragmented international community together

Integrating IT-Enabled Social Networks with Transaction Cost Economics and the Resource Based View of the Firm

Prior research has mostly focused on transaction cost economics (TCE) to interpret the effect of information systems (IS) on organizational governance structures. A TCE based approach predicts that information technology (IT) will lead to increased use of electronic markets to coordinate economic transactions from electronic hierarchies. However, there is contradictory evidence in the literature regarding the rise and importance of cooperative relationships, joint ventures, and value-added partnerships integrated through information systems. To reconcile these contradictions, this paper analyzes the effect of IT on governance structures based on the TCE, social network theory, and the resource based view (RBV) of the firm. The most important aspect of this paper is that instead of overemphasizing the economic perspective, as has been done in prior IS research, it pays equal attention to economic, social, and knowledge perspectives of the firm. By considering variables such as product demand uncertainty, human specificity, task complexity, and frequency of interaction, the effect of IT on governance structure has been analyzed. In this paper, we suggest that, in knowledge intensive companies, a greater degree of outsourcing will take place, not through markets as hypothesized by earlier researchers, but through an increasing number of social networks. This differentiation can not be understood in simple economic terms because social networks are not based on contracts. Therefore, we suggest that the integration of IT-enabled social networks with the TCE and RBV of the firm leads to a better understanding and improvement of decision-making and corporate governance structures in knowledge intensive firms

Maternal Depression in the United States: A Geographic Comparison Between Geographic Regions and Rurality

Health disparities exist between rural and urban areas but geographic comparisons of mental health are less studied and conclusive. Maternal depression has not been examined by region or rurality in the United States but might be influenced by geographic locations due to the variance of social support and healthcare available in some locations compared to others. The research focuses on (1) whether rurality increases a mother’s risk of experiencing depression and (2) if region impacts a mother’s risk of depression. I used the NESARC-III data that included three general depressive disorders: major depressive episode, major depressive disorder, and dysthymia. Regions are divided into the Northeast, Midwest, South, and the West. Rurality includes rural and urban locations. Certain demographic variables are included to control for variations by location. The research is a secondary analysis of the NESARC-III data so the research costs are limited. The statistical analysis uses step-wise logistic regression models. The study finds that mothers do not experience depressive disorders differently between regions or rural/urban locations. A check analyzing all females shows that living in the West increases a woman’s risk of experiencing both major depressive episodes and major depressive disorders. Variables explaining the most variation between having and not having a depressive disorder are the social support variables