Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Porter’s model has been criticised and debated 2 but remains popular
and is sold in the form of re-engineering solutions by related Har-
vard institutions (for example, the Institute for Competitiveness and
Institute for Competitiveness and Strategy) and associated strategy
fi rms (such as the Monitor Group and ontheFRONTIER Group.).
Through its joint claims to expertise and efforts, Porter’s cluster-
based competitiveness concept was applied to different countries (e.g.
Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzer-
land) and regions (e.g. Atlanta, Central European Region-Vienna,
and Hong Kong/PRD). Several strategy firms (e.g. ontheFRON-
1 Clusters are made visible via the technique of ‘cluster charts’ which identify local
industries based on export statistics and use the diamond model to test selected cases
to establish a pool of unique clusters.
• Asian Development
Outlook 2003: III
Asian Development Bank
Competitiveness in
Developing Countries
• Pan African
Regional African Union Competitiveness
Forum 2008
• Competitiveness of
Inter-American Development Small Enterprises:
Bank Cluster and Local
Development 2007
• OECD’s International
Conference on City
Competitiveness 2005
Numerous (inter-)city
• The Hong Kong
Local/City competitiveness projects and
Advantage 1997
plans
• Blue Book of City
Competitiveness in
China 2008
of environmental degradation.
6 While varieties of capitalism are often analysed in isolation from each other as if each
were viable without other varieties, variegated capitalism explores the links among
varieties of capitalism within the world market – whether due to their respective
specialisations in the international division of labour, their respective modes of
regulation and forms of state, their respective temporalities, or their respective
positions as creditors and debtors. This perspective excludes the generalisation of
one variety to the whole world market as well as simplistic forms of regime shopping,
in which social forces seek to combine features of different varieties of capitalism to
seek the optimum balance among them (personal communication from Bob Jessop, 25
September 2008).
struggles against wal-martisation and neoliberal competitiveness in (southern) china 167
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