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Aspects of the furniture industry in Ireland

Heanue, Kevin (2009) Aspects of the furniture industry in Ireland. PhD thesis, Dublin City University.

Abstract
This dissertation examines aspects of networking, industrial organisation, innovation, and industrial agglomeration in the Irish furniture manufacturing industry. With its focus on firm behaviour, industrial organisation and industrial structure the research is located within the tradition of industrial economics. Based on heterodox economic perspectives and utilising a variety of methods (albeit principally case study based), the dissertation provides new theoretical and empirical knowledge on this under-researched, resilient, predominantly Irish-owned and geographically dispersed low and medium technology industry. The dissertation consists of four thematically homogenous papers, the theme being the industrial economics of the furniture industry in Ireland. The first paper, based on a case study of a network of three furniture firms, differentiates between two main situations in terms of the evolution of trust: where firms are geographically clustered and where they are spatially dispersed. The second paper examines the development of the Irish furniture industry in the context of policy changes, and compares two different forms of industrial organisation in the furniture industry, the wooden furniture industrial district in County Monaghan and the TORC network in Dublin, Wicklow and Cork. The third paper, drawing on case studies of four firms, examines the changing nature of embeddedness and innovation for Irish low-tech firms, focusing primarily on the furniture industry but also including data on another low-tech sector – fabricated metal products – as a comparison. The final paper, using the methodology of standardised location quotients, addresses whether or not there is evidence of industrial agglomeration in the Irish furniture industry. Findings and implications of the research are drawn together in the conclusion.
Metadata
Item Type:Thesis (PhD)
Date of Award:November 2009
Refereed:No
Supervisor(s):Jacobson, David
Uncontrolled Keywords:Irish industry; furniture; industrial organisation; industrial agglomeration;
Subjects:Business > Industries
Business > Innovation
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > DCU Business School
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. View License
ID Code:14872
Deposited On:11 Nov 2009 16:25 by Rachel Keegan . Last Modified 19 Jul 2018 14:48
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