Supplier search in industrial clusters: Sheffield metal working in the 1990s

The typical industrial cluster tends to be seen as a cohesive and harmonious community of firms working together, albeit within a wider competitive context. Within such spatial clusters we might anticipate high levels of personal interaction between the owners/managers of firms, which might, in turn, have a bearing on intra-cluster trading patterns. As Grabher (1993, p. 4) observes, ‘social influences [can act] as contextual factors that support economic behaviour’. In addition to support from local organizations and institutions, a firm embedded in the socioeconomic milieu of a particular cluster might well gain from ‘the presence of an intricate [personal] network of mainly informal contacts of local actors (…) made up of personal face-to-face encounters, casual information flows, customer-supplier co-operation and the like’ (Camagni 1991, p. 133).