Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development

The paradigm of mass production, based on long series of similar goods, the integrated industrial corporation, and the big factory, has given way to radically new forms of organizing industrial production, based principally around the need to foster continuous redesign of products and processes in an attempt to continually keep ahead of potential competitors. These changes, which are designed to engender continuous adaptive learning in production systems, require considerable organizational flexibility. The mass production systems constructed in the early post-war period foundered in the face of competitors who were able to fully exploit these new techniques. Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development brings together the principal theoreticians on these subjects in the principal countries where the debate has unfolded. Every paper is written by a major figure, and each captures the state-of-the-art thinking on the organization of production, the economics of production, technological change, the international and regional consequences of the new production paradigms, and the possible pathways to industrial and regional development in the 1990's

Table of Contents:
Elmar Altvater, Free University of Berlin; Patrizio Bianchi, Universities of Udine and Bologna; Benjamin Coriat, University of Paris; Giovanni Dosi, University of Rome; Bernard Ganne, Maison Rhone-Alpes des Sciences de l'Homme, Lyon; Paul Hirst, University of London; Makoto Itoh, University of Tokyo; Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster; Daniele Leborgne, CEPREMAP, Paris; Alain Lipietz, CEPREMAP, Paris; Edward H. Lorenz, University of Notre Dame; Michael Piore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Claudine Romani, CEREQ, Paris

About the Author :
Scott, Allen J.; Storper, Michael

Review :
`This is an impressive book - not only for the quality of the writing and the importance of the writers who contribute and for the diversity of disciplines involved, but for the balance achieved within the volume ... should provide a basis and touchstone for much important work in the 1990s.' - Urban Studies `If asked on the well-known BBC radio programme in which a guest has both a choice of music and a key book to take to a desert island, I would give the collection of essays edited by Michael Storper and Allen J. Scott serious consideration as reading material. ... This is an important volume ... for its real sense of debate. ... It has been a pleasure even to be an onlooker in reviewing the book and I would recommend it as key reading.' - Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers `Pathways represents one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date statements of current thinking on post-Fordism.' - Progress in Human Geography