The paper explores the structure, the relationships inside the food chain and the evolution of the meat (pork) processing industry located in a typical “district area”: a dense network of big, small and medium enterprises, private and cooperative, creates a cluster, organised around specialisation in the different stages of production. A look of the evolution of the business's organisational structure, underlines its main determinants and show that the adjustments in face of the globalisation reinforced the configuration as a cluster. In the paper, the attention is focused on the “Institutional Structure of Production” (Coase 1992) and the cluster is considered as a whole, as a complex economic player, capable of generating coherent action, regulated by institutional mechanisms, and founded on a set of "public assets" which make up its “social capital”. These features underline the existence of a specific unit of analysis, indivisible from the "individuals" which constitute it. The discussion has touched on the classical themes of the efficiency of the net-economy based on small and medium enterprises, and their prospects in a context of growing globalisation. The case study has allowed us to verify the strength of the hypothesis of a unit of analysis different from the firm, for the discussion of problems of innovation and development.
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