Consocia et impera: How the French and Italian fabric producers cooperate in order to affirm the dominant design in the fashion industry

Concertation is a process used by French and Italian producers of high quality fabrics to build and sustain - season after season - their position as world leaders in the fine fashion industry, despite strong competition from emerging countries. In this paper, we employed ethnographic methods to make sense of the concertation process. Concertation, we argue, is essentially an interpretive enterprise, where a favorable business environment is socially constructed through the interaction of key actors. An outcome of the concertation mechanism is a social stratification of the marketplace, i.e. leaders vs. followers and innovators vs. imitators, which has implications in terms of marketplace status and premium prices. Our ethnographic interpretation of the concertation process has managerial implications, as it suggests guidelines along which to manage inter-organizational collaboration among competitors.