The Relationship of Entrepreneurship-Orientation and Market-Orientation in the Business Performance of Companies that Export Clothing in the State of Jalisco, Mexico.

• Author: Pelayo-Maciel, Jorge

INTRODUCTION

Dynamic activities, as the authors mention, are associated with high-level activities, Organizations are linked to the ability of their administrations to manage opportunities and threats, as well as to combine and configure assets to meet the needs of customers. The dynamic capacities reside mainly with the top executives of the companies in such a way that they are oriented to the market and entrepreneurship, understanding the capacity of the company to manipulate, protect and leverage intangible assets in order to obtain better long-term results for the better performance of the company. Likewise, there is talk of the positive relationship that exists between business orientation and market orientation in commercial performance, however, it has been not been explored in a changing industry such as the clothing industry. Entrepreneurs and managers of the industry are not aware of how these variables relate to their performance (Arend, 2013; Dosi, Nelson, & Winter; 2000, Farrell & Oczkowski, 1997; Jantunen, Puumalainen, Saarenketo, & Kylaheiko; 2005; Kumar, Jones, Venkatesan, & Leone, 2011).

This study is based on the clothing industry in Mexico. It is one of the oldest manufacturing activities in the country and one of the most representatives of global trade. Currently, according to the Consejo de la Moda (2016), China occupies the first place in exports, the United States of America being the world consumer par excellence along with other developed countries and the European Union. The textile industry in Mexico is represented mostly by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and is an industry with serious lags in infrastructure, technology, product development and strategic structure in such a way that the external market cannot be blamed for its lag due to the current situation of the industry.

In the 1990s, the textile industry became a dynamic sector and placed Mexico as the number one supplier of textile and clothing exports to the American market. In the same decade, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed that came into force in 1994, which generated a tariff reduction, which generated a penetration to the American market. But, despite the above, at the beginning of the new millennium, China began to position itself as the main supplier not only of the North American market but worldwide. The competitive advantage that Mexico possessed, which was proximity to North America, was reduced thanks to the productive capacity of some of the countries that have remote locations, such as China and its counterparts in general. In addition to their productive capacity, they have managed to develop a logistics infrastructure that allows them to reach the most remote markets quickly and efficiently, which is why they can reach the European and American market quickly and in very large quantities of production (Richart, 2012). Therefore, it should be asked: what are the factors that have led to the fall of this sector and why has it not been consolidated as other sectors, such as the automotive and electronics sector. According to a specialized study "the segment that generates the most value is the manufacture of clothing with 73.3% of the current market; and it is expected that by 2019 the textile market in the country will grow by 35.5% from 2014 "(Market Line Industry Profile, 2015). For this reason, carrying out research on this issue is justified, especially as there are signs that the textile-clothing industry is still alive and can generate a strong income. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to identify the relationship that exists between the variables, orientation to entrepreneurship and orientation to the market, with the business performance of the exporting companies of the clothing industry in the state of Jalisco.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The theory of the dynamic capacities is born from the gap left by Porter (1990) by not mentioning how to maintain the competitive advantage in companies in his theory The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990). The dynamic capacities theory mentions that this has developed in environments with constant technological changes (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen; 1997; Fernandez-Mesa, Alegre-Vidal, Chiva-Gomez, & Gutierrez-Gracia, 2013; Dosi, Nelson, & Winter, 2000), as in the case of the apparel industry, in which the term fast fashion has been adopted. That is, a production model in which, for instance, the chain of Spanish clothing ZARA has been the winner. This is because the development of their timeless basic garments and low rotation has led to its production being achieved in two weeks, a system that once boosted the brands Benetton and GAP who in past years were the precursors (Barreiro, 2008). For Taplin (2014), fast fashion is associated with retailers that provide cheap clothing in unlimited quantities that keep customers coming to stores. In this sector it will always be dynamic because the tastes of people change constantly and you can never discern exactly what the client is looking for since he is always changing his tastes for products or services that meet his needs.

For Garzon Castrillon (2015, p. 117), dynamic capabilities are defined "as the potential of (inimitable) the company to generate new organizational knowledge from a continuous creation, amplification, improvement, protection, integration, reconfiguration, renewal, recreation, increase and reconstruction of their distinctive skills, to be able to respond to changes in markets and technologies, which include the company's ability to reconfigure the environment in which it operates, developing new products and/or processes and designing and implementing new or redefined plausible business models to maintain and/or expand competitive advantages." Distinctive skills, according to Javidan (1998) and Prahalad and Hamel, (1990) are identified as the combination of resources, skills and competencies of a company, which results in skills and knowledge shared across the firm and its business units that work in full.

In terms of internationalization, it is determined that there are two resources that stand out in this sense, Market-Orientation (MO) (Serrano, Armario, & Moreno, 2011; Knight & Cavusgil, 2004) and Orientation-entrepreneurship (OE) (Serrano et al., 2011; Knight & Cavusgil, 2004). The combination of MO and OE allows the development of distinctive skills defined as essential or core competencies and unique skills throughout...