Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
31st APDR Congress – Regional Innovation Ecosystems and Sustainable Development, Porto, Portekiz, 26 - 28 Haziran 2024, ss.180-181, (Özet Bildiri)
In economic geography, two different approaches have emerged since 1990s to explain the relationship between
institutions and urban/regional economic development and also effects of institutions on industrial development:
dominant and new. The dominant approach has considered the institutions sometimes as the formal and informal rules
and sometimes organizations or untraded interdependencies (Storper, 1995). However, this view has received various
criticism for failing to conceptualize institutional change and not produce a holistic theory of institutions. On the other
hand, the new approach has claimed that criticisms can be eliminated by abandoning this plurality. The pioneers of this
approach developed an alternative view specific to the discipline in which institutions are considered as behavioral
patterns based on mutual expectations and sanctions (Bathelt and Glückler, 2014). Subsequently, institutional change
has been explained through the typologies of interactions among the building blocks of the institutional context.
Adopting the approach of Bathelt and Glückler (2014), this study aims to understand how institutional change affects the
development of Turkish shipbreaking industry. This industry was established in the 1920s in the Golden Horn (İstanbul)
and moved to Aliağa shipbreaking industrial park in İzmir in the 1980s. Thus, unlike the contributions to the existing
framework, this study assumes that institutional change begins with a bottom-up causality, based on the relocation
history of the industry. To test this assumption, 30 interviews were conducted with different actors. According to the
findings, temporary employment, subcontracting and succession were observed as three institutions that affect the
development of industry. In addition, supporting the argument put forward, it has been found that organizational field-
specific dynamics, that is, bottom-up causality, was effective in the transformation of the temporary employment
institution into the subcontracting institution. Over time, it has been observed that outsourcing, one of the two sub-
typologies of subcontracting, has died this time due to top-down causality triggered by the changes in regulations. The
other sub-typology, insourcing, still exists in some firms today, but it is estimated to die in the future for the same reasons.
Besides all these, introducing that institutions may die over time is another finding that constitutes the original value of
study. Finally, no change has been observed in the succession directed by family logic and it still exists in Aliağa since the
1990s. In conclusion, this study contributes to the conceptualisation of institution and institutional change developed by
Bathelt and Glückler (2014) in the field of institutional economic geography.