The Greening of the Global Auto Industry in a Period of Crisis

Since its foundation, GERPISA has persistently analysed, compared and conceptualised the trajectories and strategies of car makers and The Second Automobile Revolution published in 2009 bears witness to the dynamism of this research stream within the network. The impact of the current crisis on the world’s car makers has varied depending on their strategies, the breakdown of their markets and their specific production-related problems. Since 2008, their reactions to the crisis have, as a result, varied.
 
This session delves into this comparison in order to understand the range of solutions that have emerged as each firm seeks to achieve a new balance between the economic survival and improved economic performance. The comparison will question the stability of the current hierarchy of firms in the global economy.

Improving the environmental performance of the automobile is not simply a technological issue. What is at stake is the role of the automobile in the broader system of mobility that is situated in a broader context of public policy on urbanism and regional planning. Car manufacturers are obliged to rethink what it is they bring to the marketplace in this new landscape. Multiples experiments are thus underway giving rise to a vast literature on the reconception of the mobility chain and the respositioning of the automobile. This structural reconfiguration of the autombile’s role will impact on the technologies adopted and the  business models promoted by the industry and is thus a key question for researchers of the automobile industry. Research on the wave of new experiments concerning new forms of mobility will be particularly welcome.

The potential Second Automotive Revolution involves major technological disruption and a repositioning of the products and activities linked to the automobile. This will impact significantly on traditional training and employment practices and firms will be faced with the need to identify their core competencies and manage the transition of large numbers of employees. GERPISA’s previous research has successfully highlighted the large diversity of practices adopted by firms in this respect, termed “national models”. These existing differences will be both altered and renewed in the current context technological rupture and these changes are  worthy of study from both an operational and a scientific perspective.
Industrial relations settings at company and national levels and transnational union strategies at international level will also have to deal with these changes. Under the present context of crisis the shift toward a more sustainable development will probably imply more trade-offs than synergies, and the place and the future of the employment in the industry appear to be very much at stake. How this will affect the evolution of company compromises of governement and of national social compromises will be also of particular interest here.

Proposals could encompass the organisational restructuring of the activities of design, manufacturing and the commercialisation of automobiles in the past and in the future at the level of the firm, of labor pools and of individual countries. Papers focusing on the role and input of union actors at local, regional and national levels will be also particularly welcome.