Coordination and unity of the books to be published

The fifth meeting of the International Steering Committee of the programme took place on 16th-18th November 1995 at Gif-sur- Yvette, at the "CNRS Château". The pleasant location and sunny cool weather created a good environment for a very intensive work session. The meetings were basically devoted to a discussion of the book on "new industrial models" and the introductory chapters for the thematic books on "production organization", "employment relations", and "hybridization", there being insufficient time to discuss "trajectories" (the exact titles remain to be decided).

The discussion led to some general shared conclusions, which will unify the GERPISA books. These conclusions can be summarized as a clear message which constitutes the distinctive statement of the programme we have been undertaking. They will also serve as guides for the final versions of the above introductory chapters, and as final suggestions for our various authors. They will probably be published in the next Lettre du GERPISA, after they have been edited, and they will then be discussed at a next GERPISA study day in Paris. To summarize (oversimplifying somewhat), the conclusions are that there are several production models that are viable and effective today, as in the past, despite convergence factors probably more powerful than previously. These models are not the outcome of a deliberate plan on the part of company managers, but are the product of temporary and partly unintentional compatibilities between the context, the profit strategy of the company, its production organization and its employment relations.

However, it appears beyond our reach today (and moreover was never our goal) to reach identical conclusions in terms of the precise characterizations of these different models. Not because that would be impossible, but because it would have been necessary to have had deeper discussions over a much longer period, point by point, on the basis of detailed papers, as was done at Gif-sur-Yvette.

The gradual "growth in power" of the network and the programme delayed these discussions. If the second programme is to be at least as ambitious as the first, it will benefit from the lessons that we can draw from our experience.

It was nevertheless considered to be a very positive outcome to have arrived at such an agreement, even if limited thus far only to the members of the International Steering Committee, especially if one recalls the initial arguments developed by various participants (see Figure 4 in Actes du GERPISA No. 15). This gives us a good indication of the viability and fecundity of the type of scientific cooperation that GERPISA has been trying to implement for several years: take the risk of all of us asking the same research question, select a question which is both an important scientific challenge and a challenge for companies, and their employees find the resources to discuss and respond to the question, adopting procedures compatible with, and a work programme coherent with, the question posed, proceeding through successive conceptual clarifications, sharing the results of our personal work and undertaking any necessary extra work.

Accordingly, recognizing the limits reached by the joint discussions of the first programme, the book coordinators will have sole responsibility for the precise propositions they make regarding different models, after having discussed these as much as possible with the authors whose work they are coordinating, as well as clearly citing, as they should do, the ideas and facts borrowed from both within and outside GERPISA.

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