Patterns of industrial upgrading in the clothing industry in Poland and Romania

This paper aims at understanding the impact of industrial networks with foreign and other domestic organizations on industrial upgrading of the clothing companies in Poland and Romania over the past decade. The research presented in this paper is based on interviews carried out in ten large clothing companies in Poland and Romania. The paper shows that there are differing structural influences of buyer-driven global networks on the industrial upgrading of Polish and Romanian clothing firms. Taking these global buyers as exemplars to themselves, Polish and Romanian clothing firms follow relatively different upgrading patterns, experiencing more or less the same network relationships with foreign buyers whereas differing networks with other organizations in their countries. As the level of accumulation of knowledge and skills differs among the firms, the pace and level of upgrading differs too. This paper has proposed a stylized pattern but it should not be taken as inevitable since it also tries to show that some firms might skip some sequences. As a consequence, it is not a question of the positioning of the countries on a single upgrading ladder, but more accurately it is different upgrading ladders that have been climbed in each country. There is no single pattern for all of them

Industrial integration and growth of firm in transition economies: the case of a French multinational company

In the last decade, the prospect of accession of Central and East European countries (CEECs) to the European Union has given momentum to the discussion of their economic integration into the EU. Thus, academic studies have generally focused on variables at the macro level and are conducted in the light of quantitative methodologies in social sciences. This paper instead focuses mainly on the industrial integration of the CEECs into the EU at the firm and inter-organisational level, and uses in-depth, face-to-face interview techniques. Examining the growth of a multinational firm that operates in CEE in the context of networks help us to determine the depth of east-west industrial networks. In this light, the aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of the 'network alignment' framework from the perspective of the multinational companies located and operating in CEE. The growth of the French Soufflet Group in CEECs is taken as an exemplar to demonstrate the need to link the elements of the existing literature on foreign direct investment (multinational companies) with an evolutionary approach, through consideration of evolving and multiple networks