Conceptualizing Clusters as Dynamic and Path-Dependent Pools of Skills

This paper conceptualizes clusters as pools of dynamic, path-dependent skills that sustain economic resilience, transformation and development. It draws on extensive archival, historical material and empirical findings from the city of Coventry, UK, to demonstrate the long-term nature and processes of skills accumulation, growth and development. This novel approach to theorizing and understanding clusters provides a critique of current cluster conceptualizations, and offers an alternative imaginary to understanding agglomerations of economic activity. The paper also highlights problems and failures in cluster development and their sustenance through a skills pool. It develops implications for the sustained nourishment and replenishment of skills and validates skills as a critical unit of observation and analysis of clusters. The paper provides a longitudinal, socio-historical account of clusters that morph and evolve over time through the reconfiguration of path-dependent skills in support of the conceptualization.