Why the garden club couldn't save Youngstown : social embeddedness and the transformation of the rust belt

In 1975, Allentown, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio could be considered of a piece. Both were mid-sized cities in which nearly 35% of the local work force was employed in manufacturing. By 1983, both had taken on the moniker of the "rust belt"; dual processes of deindustrialization and hollowing out pointed toward bleak futures. Yet, twenty years later, it is clear that the cities' economies have actually proceeded down dramatically divergent paths. Allentown has found itself on the high-road of economic change (Harrison and Bluestone 1983; Piore and Sabel 1984; Kochan, Katz and McKersie 1986; Dertouzos, Lester and Solow 1989) while Youngstown has fallen into a lean and mean race to the bottom (Applebaum and Batt 1994; Harrison 1996). Challenging both learning region (Amin and Thrift 1994; Florida 1995) and communitarian social capital (Putnam 2000) perspectives on sub-national socio-economic change processes, this thesis argues that the cities' economic divergence can be traced to differences in the social structures in which firms are embedded (Romo and Schwartz 1995). Social embeddedness perspectives reject explanations based on either broad categorizations or pure efficiency in favor of ones that take into account the concrete structure of actors social networks (Granovetter 1985; DiMaggio and Powell 1990). These networks shape action both by determining access and control over information and resources as well as by defining the contexts in which actors' world views are rooted (Padgett and Ansell 1993; Podolny 1998). The research presented in this thesis is unique in that it combines sub-national historical comparison (c.f., Locke 1995; Saxenian 1996; Molotch, Greidenberg and Paulsen 2000) with longitudinal data on the structure of board

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Safford, Sean C

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael J. Piore.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/17797

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17797