Informal knowledge exchanges under complex social relations: A network study of handloom clusters in Kerala, India
Robin Cowan & Anant Kamath
#2012-031
When agents use informal interaction to exchange knowledge, their
production relations may develop as emergent properties of their social
relations and may exhibit homophily. The Saliyar community cluster in
India is an archetype of this. This cluster's experience is investigated
on how its thickly homophilous networks have steered it from dominance
to decline, in the market for a product which calls for constant
improvement of know-how, under unchanging production technology. A
network analysis of the Saliyars community cluster - in comparison with
the networks of the communities in a cluster of a similar population at
Payattuvila, which has surged ahead of the Saliyar Cluster in
performance in handloom weaving - provides evidence that it is not
simply social embeddedness alone, but the homophily in socially embedded
links that are detrimental to clusters dependent upon informal knowledge
exchanges. Hence, we provide evidence that social embeddedness is not as
detrimental unless combined with homophily. The conceptual ambit of
embeddedness has to broaden out to recognize that social relations come
in various 'homophilies'. This has many policy implications too as it
involves studying embeddedness and homophily in rural traditional
technology clusters intensively involving community social capital; such
clusters being ubiquitous in India and whose experiences have not been
scrutinized in this perspective.
Keywords: Clusters, Handloom, Networks, Social Embeddedness, Homophily,
Kerala
JEL codes: O33, Z13