La Lettre du GERPISA

no 127 (december 1998)

Programme News 2

How Travel the Productive Models?

The Hybridization as an Innovation Process

Recent years have seen intense debates among management and academics on the rise of ‘lean production’ and ‘japanization’. Some authors have stressed the ‘universal’ impact of new forms of work organization and ‘best practice’, while others have questioned the limits of convergence; stressed the weight of national contexts, or highlighted the evolutionnary effects of unpredictability in the external environment.

The international automobile industry has been a focus for much of this debate. Between Imitation and Innovation, written by a team of leading international researchers in the field, uses this industry to examine in detail the actual practice of the transfer and adaptation of productive models and the trajectories of innovation, compromise, and failure that can result. First, it presents the attempts at the international transfer of ‘Fordist’ systems in the early and mid-twentieth century, and the transfer of so-called ‘Japanese’ systems in the late twentieth century. Secondly, it argues that direct transplantation or imitation of productive models is rarely feasible or even desirable.

Hybridization is inevitable. But this should not be seen simply as a process of compromise and retreat, but also as important dynamic process of innovation and emergence of new industrial model.

The book analyses more than twelve transplants, as japanese as european and american, in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. It will be essential for students, analysts, researchers and practioners concerned with the interaction of transplanted productive models with differing national contexts.

Between Imitation and Innovation. The Transfer and Hybridization of Productive Models in the International Automobile industry, Robert BOYER, Elsie CHARRON, Ulrich JURGENS, Steven TOLLIDAY, editors, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, 394 p.

Contributors: Tetsuo ABO, Paul S. ADLER, Steve BABSON, Robert BOYER, Jorge CARILLO, Elsie CHARRON, Ben DANKBAAR, Afonso FLEURY, Richard FLORIDA, Barbara GOLDOFTAS, Davis JENKINS, Ulrich JURGENS, Thomas KIEFER, David I. LEVINE, Kazuhiro MISHINA, Yolanda MONTIEL, Frits K. Pil, Saul RUBINSTEIN, Mario Sergio SALERNO, Donald F. SMITH, Steven TOLLIDAY.

From the International GERPISA Programme ‘Emergence of New Industrial Models’