Abstract
Some African countries’ premier industries, such as textiles, garments and agro-processing, which floundered in the face of market liberalization and stiff competition from cheap imports, are now going through regenerative changes, with some beginning to tell a cautionary tale of a leap upwards. Focusing on the Ghana garment and textile industry, we draw on a framework that integrates social practices and everyday general-purpose technologies to explore the rise, decline and regeneration of the industry. Explicating a fine analysis of how the performative reconfiguration of social practices and functional sources of innovation and technologies may combine to support innovation-driven growth, our study sheds light on how loosely connected actors within a hitherto floundering industry can learn to transform their situated practices to drive their ‘industrial regeneration’. Implications for the theory and practice of industrial regeneration are outlined.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Socio-Economic Review |
| Early online date | 5 May 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 5 May 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords
- China-made technologies
- Ghana
- garment and textile industry
- social practice
- industrial regeneration