The evolving institutional embeddedness of a late-industrial district in Taiwan

The high-technology industrial system in Taiwan is noted by its decentralisation and geographical agglomeration. It demonstrates varieties of features of industrial district: spin-offs, collaborations, networking, and most importantly, institutional presences. At the initial stage, Taiwan's Government did lead in the technology transfer, rendered new firms formation and pushed the private sector hard to bring the industry into being. However, as the industry became global, new redundant and complementary institutions, including dense social and professional connections and associations, joined the monotonic role of the state to make network learning in the decentralised industrial system effective. It represented a developmental paradox: if the developmental state is argued to be a top-down bureaucratic rationality based governance mechanism, how could it build up and articulate with the supposedly bottom-up trust-based social networks? How could the potential tension between the top-down and the bottom-up be settled? The research will explore the process of institutional embeddedness, de-embeddedness, and re-embeddedness in Taiwan's high-technology region, and provide a lesson for the late-industrialising countries in the globalisation era.