Aspects of the furniture industry in Ireland

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.