An insight into the fragmentation of small firms under global competition in a machinery industrial district

This paper aims to investigate the impact of outsourcing, vertical disintegration and globalisation on the organisation and industrial relations of small district enterprises. In contrast to the extant literature, the focus is on subcontractors rather than on outsourcers. The study exploits a new source of fiscal data and places attention on the machinery sector of Emilia–Romagna, whose heterogeneity is disentangled by grouping enterprises into homogeneous clusters according to the length of their production processes and outsourcing propensities. The changes that have occurred in industrial organisation are evaluated by means of a comparison with the structure of the Emilian model in the 1980, as described by Brusco (1982). With respect to the dualism between small firms acting mainly as subcontractors and large firms directly accessing the market, a further segment composed of small-sized enterprises that simultaneously play the role of local supply chain leaders and subcontractors for large globalised companies is retrieved.