THE 10th GERPISA INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM

For the 10th year in a row, the GERPISA International Colloquium will be a chance for the many social science researchers who conduct on a daily basis in-depth analyses of the transformations of the world's automotive industry to get together. This colloquium will mark the completion of both the European CoCKEAS project and of the GERPISA third research programme, Coordinating Competencies and Knowledge in Regional Automotive Systems. Presentations of the programme's findings and the responses to its call for communications will allow us to assess the progress that has been made in our network's competencies. The provisional programme for the next colloquium will soon be available on the GERPISA website - although some early lessons can already be drawn.

Since its initial international colloquium in June 1993, the GERPISA has brought together from the four corners of the planet a wide range of researchers whose work has enhanced understanding of firms' and countries trajectories in the world automotive industry. Several of the contributions that are to be made at our upcoming meeting will help us to continue our analysis of developments in this field. This includes two collectively written GERPISA books that will be published before year end. Written for the benefit of the scientific community, these analytical summaries were initiated during our second research programme: one deals with carmakers' internationalisation strategies; the other with processes of regionalisation. Emphasis will be placed on the relationships between manufacturers and components makers, ties that are key to the co-ordination of competencies and knowledge. The third programme will have been an opportunity to focus on the work that the network's members have done in areas such as innovation management; modular production; co-development practices; or the mobilisation of competencies at the workshop level. The reconfigurations of the employment relationship, absent far too often from our recent meetings, will be widely discussed, reminding us of the significance of the constraints associated with workforce mobilisation.

Conversely, other elements will be the subject of one or two communications at best, for instance, the immaterial activities that can be found in the automobile industry. However, the discussions on financialisation that took place as part of the work carried out within the framework of the CoCKEAS project (whose main findings will be presented in a full session and used as the basis for an upcoming double issue of Competition and Change) deserve to be continued, particularly in light of the new issues that have been raised by certain recent developments (notably for Ford). Similarly, current events (i.e., new European Commission policies, internationalisation drives such as the takeover of England's Sytner group by the American UnitedAuto Group) have stressed the need to deepen our analysis of the transformations happening in the field of automobile distribution. At the technological level our studies of the effects of ICT diffusion are still in their early stages. And we have barely scratched the surface of the environmental challenges of the automobile.

We have no desire whatsoever to abandon the fundamental competencies that have long underpinned our network's longevity (analyses of employment relationships, productive organisations, types of internationalisation, etc.) but to test the conceptual progress that the GERPISA has achieved over the past decade we clearly need to consolidate our initial dealings with the new issues that the automobile industry has been facing. Our new international research programme, whose exact nature remains to be defined, should provide us with an opportunity for this.