The Coevolution of New Organizational Forms in the Fashion Industry: A Historical and Comparative Study of France, Italy, and the United States (original) (raw)
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Industrial and Corporate Change, 2011
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Gibbert, M., and Durand, T. (eds.), Strategic Networks: Learning to Compete, Wiley-Blackwell., 2006
Concertation is a process used by French and Italian producers of high quality fabrics to build and sustain – season after season – their position as world leaders in the fine fashion industry, despite strong competition from emerging countries. In this chapter, we employed ethnographic methods to make sense of the concertation process. Concertation, we argue, is essentially an interpretive enterprise, where a favorable business environment is socially constructed through the interaction of key actors. An outcome of the concertation mechanism is a social stratification of the marketplace, that is, leaders versus followers and innovators versus imitators, which has implications in terms of marketplace status and premium prices. Our ethnographic interpretation of the concertation process has managerial implications, as it suggests guidelines along which to manage interorganizational collaboration among competitors.