SBR-9422485 FELDMAN In recent years there has been much popular and academic reporting of new forms of organization of manufacturing activity. Empirical and theoretical interest has focused on spatially concentrated clusters of companies which operate in highly competitive, technology-intensive industries. The role of inter-firm linkages, local labor markets, local socialization, and forms of public and quasi-public governance have received attention, in North American, European, and East Asian contexts. This collaborative research project (with SBR-9504088; Schreuder, PI) uses historical, economic, and geographic approaches to a technology-intensive industry and region that has received relatively little attention: the pharmaceutical industry in the Philadelphia-to-New York City corridor from the early-19th through mid-20th centuries. The main goal of the research is to understand the circumstances, resources, and linkages that enabled pharmaceutical firms in the Mid-Atlantic region to find competitive advantage and to adapt, survive, and grow. The research is novel in its broad historical perspective and methods, explicitly complementing the many recent studies of current industrial clusters. The historical perspective allows study of the development of social and institutional relationships, and of the ways in which these evolving relationships influenced the market structure, technology, and geography of the industry. Company histories, labor-market studies, and patterns of supplier and market linkages provide the source material for constructing the overall explanation of the development of this industry in this region. The results of the study should add to the academic debate over the formation and operation of industrial clusters, and should inform the national and local policy debates over influences on industrial competitiveness.
