Des « clusters » aux « small-worlds » une approche en termes de proximités

Abstract

A recent literature has described, on an empirical level, the mode of working of local industrial organizations, called “clusters”, strongly inserted within global industrial and commercial networks. Those studies have shown that space by itself doesn’t offer the sufficient conditions for co-ordination but can contribute to its efficiency, providing the existence of other sharing dimensions among agents: organic level, representations, projects… Such an approach can be usefully translated in the terms of proximity economics based on “situated agents” that are involved both in a local co-ordination game and in external complementarities and competition relations. For that purpose, “small-worlds” theory brings a very fruitful way to build models in which a substantial amount of local interconnections generate a high network cliquishness, whilst a more reduced proportion of global links (shortcuts) ensures an efficient access (path length) to any node of the network.