Entrepreneurship, technological changes, and the formation of a subcontracting production system: the case of Taiwan's machine tool industry

The advantages of subcontracting production nurtured by industrial clustering have been broadly documented. Using Taiwan's machine tool industry as the study case, this paper contributes to this realm of literature through examining factors influencing and the process underlying the formation of subcontracting production systems in late-industrialising contexts. By combining perspectives on entrepreneurship and technological regime, this paper considers the formation of subcontracting networks to be the outcomes of entrepreneurs' optimising decisions and behaviours. It also explores how the entrepreneurial activities involved in building such networks are influenced by the socio-institutional, and more importantly, the technological environments within which the entrepreneurs are embedded.