Competition, collaboration and cooperation: An uneasy triangle in networks of firms and regions

Many analysts maintain that firms can meet the challenges of global competition by establishing improved competitive, collaborative or cooperative activities, hereafter called 'the 3Cs'. The paper proposes that effective industrial and regional competition is often constrained by perceived and real spatial, labour, and organizational boundaries that limit the 3C relationships within the networks of firms and regions. The paper makes three contributions to the literature. First, it distinguishes collaboration from cooperation as collective types of behaviour and asserts that both can form part of an uneasy triangle of industrial interrelationships with competition. Second, it uses the 3C relationships to help explain the 'success' of industrial organizations as portrayed by analysts in alternative industrial and regional restructuring models, namely the Italian, Japanese and Global models. It examines how analysts deal with the spatial, labour and organizational boundaries in these alternative models. Third, it shows that none of the models was sufficiently general to cover all the restructuring issues as the world has moved into the globalization form of development. Throughout, the paper asserts that an understanding of the interrelationships among the 3Cs and the primary constraints affecting those relationships will help local and national government and industrial decision-makers make effective firm, labour and regional policies.