GERPSA is no "small world"

We have received many replies to the "Call for papers" associated to the Ninth GERPISA international colloquium and the CoCKEAS workshops organised for this spring. This demonstrates the large involvement of the network's members for the issues that our third research programme are going to be covering. The meetings' agenda will be busy and diversified, and the numerous contributions will definitely help our collective thinking on the GERPISA's new scientific programme to make some significant progress. We will be in a better position to analyse the various issues of the structural changes occurring in the automotive systems, and the new forms of co-ordinating the competencies and knowledge in this industry.

With new members getting involved in this programme, we should remind people of a few of our operating rules. The GERPISA is not just a meeting of social science researchers with a particular interest in the automobile industry and its employees. Unlike most scientific associations, its sole function is not simply to disseminate information and organise sporadic meetings where rapid and superficial exchanges can take place (as described in David Lodge Small World). The GERPISA's ambition is to coordinate these researchers' competencies around a specific scientific programme by creating a situation in which their work and major preoccupations can converge on a number of shared themes, thus helping them to develop team research and collective approaches, and subsequently to produce new knowledge.

This should neither be seen as an attempt to homogenise and standardise ideas and methods, nor as some misguided effort to devise a unanimous and dogmatic view of the automotive world. But the GERPISA must be more than a simple place to exchange ideas if network members are to be encouraged to integrate into their own personal scientific questioning those preoccupations that their colleagues also is to fulfil through the renewed confrontation of ideas which occurs at each of our workshops, colloquium and meetings, and by the mean of the Lettre du GERPISA. If so, we will be able to improve our understanding of the ongoing changes that continue to affect the automotive industry Ð in which case the diverse nature of the various works that we continue to produce, and of the different approaches that we follow, will become an advantage for all of us.

European Union support for the CoCKEAS project has allowed us to organise several meetings during 2001 - a year that will be crucial for the advancement of the research programme. These meetings will be organised in such a way as to encourage joint reflection and debate. On occasion, they will dispense with the customary rules governing formal scientific conferences (i.e., where everyone is primarily focused on his/her own personal production) in an effort to present and discuss individual contributions with the perspectives being developed in our scientific programme's various strands. This collective research approach is indispensable if our activity is to have any real meaning - and if our network is to survive over the long run. The GERPISA will after all be 20 years old next March; and the Lyon and Bordeaux workshops will be good opportunities to celebrate this landmark.

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