The Impact of Crisis on the Resilience of Industrial Regions: Evidence from Denizli Textile Industry

Firms in traditional manufacturing clusters face lock-in situations when crises disrupt established routines. The study analyzes how firms embedded in a mature industrial cluster responded to COVID-19, focusing on location, firm, and relation-based indicators in the Denizli textile district in Türkiye, which remains under-represented in resilience research. A mixed-methods analysis was conducted using primary and secondary data. With secondary data, the textile industry was determined as the mature industrial cluster in Denizli by conducting a three-star analysis (which was used as the cluster analysis method for showing mature, potential, and candidate clusters) within the region’s manufacturing industries. By using primary data with a purposive sampling approach, a logistic regression model is employed to analyze a survey administered to 118 textile firms. It is found that, even though locating in a specialized cluster, partnering with NGOs, and product diversification contribute positively to resilience in adapting to crises, no new growth path is created by firms either locating in the specialized cluster or in other parts of the city. Due to the cognitive and political lock-in and power of local institutional production systems in the textile industry in Türkiye, our case conforms more to the engineering type of resilience to crises than to the adaptive type.