Studying Modes of Globalization in the Automobile Industry

The automobile has played a central role in the history of industry in general, and of organization and production in particular. Since the 1980s, it has also often been referred to as an exemple of globalization. In this perspective, the impressive internationalization of Japanese companies played a fundamental role. However, it is important to underline that even though the automobile industry fully belongs to the globalization movement which has been developing over the past 15 years, it does not really play a major role. Constructors and equipment suppliers seek to adapt themselves and to gain from the international environment's evolution just like other companies in other industrial and services sectors. The globalization/regionalization problematic, or in a larger vein globalization/territorialization, is therefore not specific to the automobile and can rely on general studies of the phonomenon.

Globalization contains two essential components: on the one hand, it is located in the evolution of worldwide geographic economics with the often astonishing emergence of new growth regions in Asia and Latin America. This phenomenon is indeed quite important, especially since the end of the Cold War which increased the role of purely economic and technical factors in the evolution of international economic relations. On the other hand, this multipolarity is accompanied by an increase in competition in several markets. The regular rhythm relative to innovations constitutes a fundamental factor in competition by reducing distance costs, but also by regularly redefining technical borders among sectors.

The intensity of competition which increases priority given to company reactivity and the mobility of production factors serve as a backdrop for the development of international production networks and complex research. This last area regroups diverse companies and institutions. From a geographic standpoint, their objective is to allow intense local interactions to combine with international connections. Hence, networks symbolize a desire for ubiquity on the part of firms which also constitutes a criticism of the traditional functioning of national economies.

It appears that it is within the general framework that GERPISA's research program should be inserted. The regionalization option represents a plausible solution towards supporting and/or learning from globalization. Evaluating its pertinence means that a simultaneous study of firm's international networks and their relations with national production systems must be carried out. GERPISA possesses just the right tools to perform this task, i.e. results from the first program on national production systems and firm's outlooks, on the one hand, and an international network of researchers on the other.

The second program should allow for a more profound analysis of interactions between firms and their socioeconomic environment. It could rely on results from GERPISA's studies of industrial models, and could also gain from general analyses of the impact of globalization on national economies which approach the question of regionalization[1] In addition, the program should propose an appropriate method for establishing a comparison of firm's globalization modalities. This would first involve locating constructor's implantations and their supply policies on an international level, and then establish the coherence of these observations with the firm's product policies[2] (worldwide vehicle, Asian vehicle). It would also be useful to enrich the analysis with case studies of production and research networks. This empirical research should allow one to evaluate the force of the homogenization couple - product/convergence of production and organization methods - which is supposed to result from globalization. The analysis of the articulation of production spaces will also allow one to evaluate to what extent they are set in a hierarchy. From this standpoint, statistical analyses of the international division of labor, such as those carried out by the European Commission to evaluate the consequences ot the common market, could allow us to compare the automobile industry with other sectors.

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