The complementarity of work groups and the Fifth International Meeting

On Friday December 13th, the four French work groups met concurrently in the morning. The purpose of these meetings was to talk about the object of each group (what question of research has to be treated and what field of investigation has to be covered), the process of analysis and the topics that have to be studied, and finally the competences that have to be found. The results of their reflections and the work plans they have created can be found in the "news about the programme" column. Everyone is requested to contribute to the creation and the fixing of these plans through remarks and proposals you can send to the GERPISA Letter, and that will be published in the "Debate" column. If not already done, please contact the person in charge of the groups you would like to join.

Naturally, the debate about the specificity of each group and the limits of its programme has been reopened ; several participants could not figure out which group would suit them better, others wondered if merges between different groups could be possible, and others wanted to change the definition and the working methods of their group. All these debates made a high complementarity and a regular coordination between the groups obvious and necessary.

The purpose of the group "global strategies, forms and trajectories of the firms of the car industry" is to understand the different choices made since the 1980s' according to the problems firms had to face (car makers, suppliers and distributors) in the four following domains : market, work, political and historical contexts and profit strategy. The group will rely on comparisons with other periods of globalization.

The group "new areas for the car industry" will follow the same approach. Its purpose is to understand the evolution of the local car industry (subsidaries of large groups, native firms) according to the problems coming from the conjunction between the global strategies of mother firms and the process of economical, social and institutional creation of these new areas (emerging countries, regional and global areas). As a matter of fact, firms have to anticipate what will be these new areas when it will still take time for the global economical and political situation to recover, and this situation could even be very different from the one expected by the firms.

Obviously, these two groups are highly complementary. The second has to be aware of the strategies for globalization of the firms. On the other hand, the first one has to know the problems the subsidaries have to face in new areas to understand the global trajectories of mother firms. Firms and areas will first be studied in their own historical dynamics, according to a common scheme of analysis that will allow later a comparison of their trajectories.

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