Competitiveness by Design: An Institutionalist Perspective on the Resurgence of a “Mature” Industry in a High‐Wage Economy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the midst of the widespread, long‐term economic downturn throughout the C anadian manufacturing landscape, the contract (or office) furniture sector has demonstrated resilience and vibrancy. The study reported here investigated the institutional foundations of innovation and competitive advantage in this dynamic, design‐led, export‐oriented manufacturing sector. It connects to ongoing work in economic geography and the social sciences to enhance economic geographers' understanding of the role of institutions in shaping the practices of firms and competitive outcomes and seeks to advance a more agency‐centered institutionalist economic geography. The study focused on three dimensions of industrial practices: (1) the use of training and investments in technology, (2) the nature of employment relations, and (3) the use of design. The analysis reveals that the most globally competitive firms operating in a C anadian institutional context prosper by learning a set of production practices and the value of design‐intensive products from the embodied knowledge of their founders, who have lived, studied and worked in high‐wage, coordinated market economies of continental E urope. The ability of these entrepreneurs to transfer industrial knowledge from continental E urope to C anada has had direct benefits for learning and innovation processes that are critical to the synthetic knowledge base of this sector. The empirical analysis entails a sector wide survey questionnaire ( N = 220) as well as 55 in‐depth interviews with senior managers, production workers, and designers from a subset of leading firms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it