Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development (Hardcover, New)

The paradigm of mass production, based on a 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. The papers include investigations into 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 1990s.