PLANT CLOSURE AND THE PATH- DEPENDENT LEARNİNG PROCESS

Neşe KUMRAL (Ege University)
Çağaçan DEĞER (Ege University)

The long-term industrial competitiveness is related to the ability of firms to continuously upgrade their knowledge base and performance, rather than just to obtain static efficiency through idendification and exploitation of cheap resources and economies of scale. It is inherent in this view that knowledge is a key asset for competing firms, and learning is a key process.

Knowledge creation or learning process is strongly path-dependent as today's practices, routines and types of knowledge are related to those of yesterday, just as those of tomorrow will be related to those of today. Especially, a long history of succesfull routines and methods is very important for a firm to create tacit knowledge and to survive in hypercompetition. One of the obstacles to establish such path-dependent 'learning trajectories' is plant closure.

This paper aims to investigate plant closure trends in manufacturing industry of Izmir, Istanbul and Ankara and to evaluate the possible effects of these trends on the path-dependent learning process.

We will conduct this investigation by examining plant closure data from SIS between years 1995 and 2001 for three cities and manufacturing sub-sectors.