| La Lettre du GERPISA | no 127 (december 1998) |
Programme News 1
How a company can be profitable in an uncertain context? Are there universal optimal methods for this? Many argue that the sole viable way for the automobile industry, indeed for all industry, is the adoption of ‘lean production’ as an organizational model.
One Best Way? brings together the analyses of the evolution and the performances of fifteen major automobile producers since the seventies, made by researchers from Europe, Japan, Korea and USA, specialist in automobile industry. To avoid fastidious description, which too often could lead to the conclusion that every case is unique, as well as superficial comparison, which is content to classify companies according to perceived similarities and differences, the contributors of this book studied the changes that the companies have made effectively to solve the problems that they have encountered successively since the seventies, and they examined the attempts of these companies to make their changes coherent and so to build or adopt an industrial model
The book shows there were in fact several possible profit making strategies and several industrial models to apply them. No one industrial model can guarantee companies the capability to withstand environmental changes and internal tensions under any circumstances. The conditions in which a model is relevant and viable are restrictived. The convergence towards a single industrial model is no more likely today than in the past. The concluding chapter highlight the challenges that confront automobile producers at the close of the twentieth century and the tensions that the current industrial models will face.
One Best way? is the first book to describe and to compare systematically the trajectories of all the main firms of an industrial sector at global level, in the last third of the twentieth century. It will be essential reading and reference for students, academics, researchers, analysts and practitioners worldwide wanting to track the course of the automobile industry, and the industry in general.
One Best Way? Trajectories and Industrial Models of the World’s Automobile Producers. Michel FREYSSENET, Andrew MAIR, Koichi SHIMIZU, Giuseppe VOLPATO (editors), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, 476 p.
Contributors: Bruce M. BELZOWSKY, Christian BERGGREN, Gérard BORDENAVE, Arnaldo CAMUFFO, Jean-Jacques CHANARON, Myeong-KEE CHUNG, Michael FLYNN, Michel FREYSSENET, Masanori HANADA, Ulrich JURGENS, Jean-Louis LOUBET, Andrew MAIR, Daniel M.G. RAFF, Koichi SHIMIZU, Koichi SHIMOKAWA, Giuseppe VOLPATO.
From the International GERPISA Programme ‘Emergence of New Industrial Models’