Competitiveness by Design: An Institutionalist Perspective on the Resurgence of a 'Mature' Industry in a High Wage Economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the learning dynamics underpinning the resurgence of Canada's office furniture manufacturing sector, which underwent dramatic growth following its near collapse in the wake of the North American trade liberalization beginning in the late 1980s. It investigates the role that design and quality have played in prompting a move up-market and enhancing the sector's competitiveness. It also focuses on other leaning processes that drive economic growth, looking at attempts to transfer workplace practices from Continental Europe to Canada, as well as the institutional obstacles that shape and constrain these processes. Finally, it examines how furniture firms learn from their customers, and the key role played by market intermediaries such as sales agents, dealers, interior designers, and architects in linking producers with consumers as well as influencing the final furniture product. The learned behaviour hypothesis that is central to this thesis suggests that globally competitive firms operating in a Canadian institutional context prosper by learning how to produce (i.e. industrial practices and processes) and what to produce (i.e. design-intensive, high quality products) from the above sources that are both internal and external to the manufacturing firm. The scope of research considers the social and organizational practices through which manufacturing knowledge is integrated into innovation processes, as well as their dynamics, spatiality and temporality, the institutional forces that shape the skills, training, tenure and design dimensions of a high performance workplace, and the mechanisms and conditions that mediate the transfer of manufacturing knowledge at a distance. The empirical analysis entails a mixed-methods approach including a survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews with industry experts. The analysis contributes to core debates in economic geography and the social sciences concerning the role of proximity and distance in innovative production, and the structure / agency debate. In summary, it finds that economic growth in the office furniture sector in Canada is dependent upon not only local knowledge networks and flows but also global sources of innovation and competitive advantage. It also advances an agency-centered institutionalist economic geography by showing that institutions interact in complex ways with the decision-making of economic actors to shape local labour dynamics and the behaviour of 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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".