In 2007 Gerpisa launched its 5th international research programme on "the automobile industry and sustainable development". Its focus was the co-existence of both the traditional contraints of the automobile industry and more recent ones linked to forms of social and environmental sustainability and the extent to which this would lead to synergies and/or trade-offs at different levels of decision-making. We assumed that that the conflicts that emerged and the innovations adopted to address them would differ among firms, localities and/or national and regional contexts.
Since 2007, the work conducted and presented at Gerpisa's annual international meeting has largely confirmed this assumption. The traditional and the new constraints have combined in different ways to reconfigure automobile firms and industries generally. We have had to integrate the impact of the financial and economic crises of 2008 and 2009. These have caused firms to fight for their survival at the same time as they develop practices of sustainable development and both dimensions have had to be taken into account by researchers in our programme.
In 2011, the characteristics of the post-crisis landscape of the automobile industry remain unclear. The current period is one of industrial transformation of a scale previously unimaginable. On the one hand, emerging markets have grown significantly and the growth of the Chinese market, in particular, has become of central importance. On the other hand, environmental concerns have successfully highlighted the question of the sustainability of the automobile's continued development if it remains dependent on the internal combustion engine. If the first automobile revolution was the mass development of the car itself, it is possible that the combination of these two factors will create the stage for a second automobile revolution.
This Call for Papers thus asks for submissions that examine if and how this second automobile revolution is occurring in different firms and in different regions of the world.
5 specific series of questions are proposed:
- The transformation of car manufacturers, their activities and their strategies in the current period.
- The transformations of large traditional and emerging automobile industries and the policies and institutions that structure the industry dynamics and functioning.
- The transformations of production, of work and of the negotiations of industrial relations that determine the global dynamics of the automobile industry.
- The technological and systems transformations that are linked with the technological innovations that are emerging in firms and in the public policy arena.
- The transformations in demand that are required to adjust to the fact that macro-economic policies and public policy designed to regulate automobile usage patterns are altering the place occupied by the automobile in household budget and mobility systems.
