PENGUATAN KLASTER INDUSTRI BATIK MENGGUNAKAN SELF-DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY DI KABUPATEN TUBAN

Abstract

The classical problems dealing with raw materials supply, technology applied, and business management still remain to happen in the business performance of batik industries. In order to overcome those problems, the batik entrepreneurs should employ a strategy which refers to self-propelled improvement of individual, organizational, and collective behaviors in the batik industry towards development of the quality of its products, services, and markets in an independent way, and also in building a strong network of cooperation and coordination among the local batik communities themselves and with other related agencies. The purpose of this paper is to study the functioning of self-development strategy for empowering the batik industry cluster, their benefits and costs, and obstacles they face in the development process. This study also determines the extent of business performance of batik enterprises in Tuban District. The population of the study was all batik industry business units of the selected areas. The respondents were determined by snowball sampling method in every area consisting of 84 businessmen in the batik industry. Aside from the secondary data, the primary data was collected by ethnographic (unstructured and semi-structured interviews, and direct observation) and participatory methods (key informant interviews). The relevant result is that this strategy therefore, is a key to promoting individual, organizational, collective capabilities, strong network, cooperation and coordination within the local batik industry communities themselves and together with other related agencies. The study successfully identified the personal attributes (socio-demographic and socio-psychological characteristics) of the batik entrepreneurs, determined the benefit and cost of the development strategy, as well as identified the obstacles encountered in the development process. Business performance was also carefully investigated along with the factors that possibly affect it.