Geographical embeddedness of large corporations in Turkey

A fundamental issue around large corporations is to understand how they contribute to the formation of national and global economies. Starting from Perroux (1955), who viewed growth within the network of industries, the network linkages amongst enterprises have been considered both at the regional and national level through input-output relations, and at the international level through cross-border investment by transnational corporations (TNCs) (Myrdal 1957, Hirschman 1958, Perroux, 1973). However, these ongoing interactions started to constrain institutions as they became no longer ‘independent’ (Granovetter 1985: 482). Granovetter (1985) explained the concept of embeddedness in terms of the role of social relations in economic transactions and this has given rise to a powerful model of local economic growth that draws on a range of complementary literatures on new industrial spaces, learning regions, innovative milieu and regional innovation systems, clusters, and the creative class (for example Storper 1997, Braczyk et al. 1998, Porter 1998, Florida 2002, MacKinnon, Cumbers and Chapman 2002, Cumbers, MacKinnon and Chapman 2003). The aim of this chapter is to study the geographical agglomeration of the top 500 large corporations in Turkey. It argues that local embeddedness of those corporations leads to an institutional thickness that is thought to be one crucial success factor for regions in a globalizing economy.