商品詳細

For the past century manufacturing organization and the industrial policies of governments have both been heavily influenced by models of how to achieve industrial efficiency. Beginning with the American model of standardized mass production, firms and governments throughout the world have sought to modernise manufacturing organization according to such models as the means of national competitive advantage and economic success. "Governing Flexibility" focuses on assessing the validity and influence of such models. Firstly, it examines the intense debates on the relative merits and the degree of diffusion of the main competing models of industrial efficiency and manufacturing organization. Secondly, it considers the question of whether, in a period when all the major sources of models of manufacturing success - the USA, Germany, Japan and Italy - have encountered major difficulties, there are more effective strategies for reversing industrial decline. The following debates are considered: the continuing relevance of standardized mass production; the utility of the concepts of Fordism and Post-Fordism; the nature and relevance of forms of flexibility in specialised production in both large and small firms; the significance of industrial districts in modern industrial economies; the re-emergence of regional forms of economic governance Concepts such as Post-Fordism and Flexible Specialization have become central to our understanding of industrial societies and have wide diffussion in the social sciences, not just specialists in industrial organisation.