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| HUMAN AGENCY, TRIANGULATIONS AND INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS IN CHINA |
| LIN Tao |
| Deptment of Urban and Regional Planning, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China |
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Abstract There is an urgent need for researching into the domain of human agency of actors within the realistic cluster context of China. Human agency of actors, which involves actors' awareness, consciousness, creativity, activity, and so on, is a key to the dynamics of clusters if the evolutionary processes are carefully examined. Human agency of actors has specific influence on clusters' different stages of being initiated, upgraded, transformed and even declining. The reality of clusters can never be easily realized unless enough attention is paid to human agency of actors related to clusters.
However, the insufficiency to understand human agency is also found when the approaches of cluster research are carefully examined according to typology of data. Most of the approaches deal with "attribute data" and "relational data", which describe the attributes and relationships of clusters, firms, moons and any related object. Compared with attribute data and relational data, "ideational data" of actors can offer basic information to understand human agency. But ideational data is almost completely ignored and usually treated as unscientific data by researchers. This situation should be changed because the human agency of entrepreneurs, officials and workers has important effect on clusters' development. Ontologically, actors' wills and efforts as well as their interactions fundamentally change the clusters they related to. Indeed, ideational data give us a chance to have further understanding of actors' human agency in clusters.
Then, a methodological framework of triangulatious, which is introduced from economic geography and is meticulously adapted with the light shed by phenomenology and hermeneutics, comes up to meet the requirement of understanding human agency of actors in clusters. The framework of triangulations is reconstructed to examine the ideational data of actors in clusters and to focus on human agency. It blankets any presumptions of actor's behaviors. Then it seeks for attribute data and relational data to further the understanding of actors and the context of clusters, and reconstructs explanations of evolution of clusters based on human agency of actors openly and critically. Any researcher led by framework of triangulation can deeply realize the implication of ideational data by learning the way actors consider and behave in the context of their clusters. This helps to advance the understanding of cluster evolution.
With the application of framework of triangnlations, theories on clusters evolution can be reconstructed reflexively according to human agency, care about people who live and work in clusters, and appreciate actors' struggle to make a living-a key topic of economic geography. Thus, the framework of triangulations has important theoretical and practical implications for economic geography and human geography, and it needs to be deeply developed and be systematically applied to the practices of industrial clusters in China.
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Received: 21 March 2007
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2008, Vol. 23 
