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This paper offers an approach for outlining the main dimensions surrounding clusters in three areas of knowledge: economic geography, strategic management and operations management, the first being considered its natural field of knowledge.

The work was developed using the citation analysis technique as applied to a database of 627 articles and 22,980 citations, taken from 15 important journals in the areas selected.

The results proved that the theoretical and conceptual bases are unique to each of the areas studied and that they have few topics in common between them. They are complementary, however, and this facilitates their reconciliation.

The sample base, despite considering fairly influential periodicals in the areas of knowledge selected, can be considered to be a limitation.

Common themes and different areas of knowledge surrounding the cluster concept were identified; despite being considered “common”, a more detailed examination of their content reveals very different, but certainly complementary emphases, which makes it possible to reconcile the areas of knowledge.

This paper aims to contribute to the approaches based on traditional industry concentration statistics for identifying clusters by complementing them with the techniques of exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA).

Using a sample with 34,500 observations retrieved from the social information annual report released by Brazil Ministry of Labor and Employment, the methodology was designed to make a comparison between the application of industry concentration statistics and ESDA statistics.

As the results show, the geographic distribution measures proved to be fundamental for longitudinal studies on regional dynamics and industrial agglomerations, and the local indicator of spatial association statistic tends to overcome the limitation of the industry concentration approach.

In the period considered, due to economic, structural and circumstantial questions, activities linked to the transformation industry have been losing ground in the value creation process in Brazil. In this sense, the study of other industries may generate other types of insights that should be considered in the process of regional development.

This paper offers a critical analysis of empirical approaches and methodological advances with an emphasis on the treatment of special effects: spatial dependence, spatial heterogeneity and spatial scale. However, the regional dynamic presents a temporal dimension and a spatial dimension. The role of space has increasingly attracted attention in the analysis of economic changes. This work has identified opportunities for incorporating spatial effects in regional analysis over time.