International Colloquium 2012 - Call for papers

The magnitude of the changes putting pressure on different automotive system actors to adapt their driving systems and acclimatize to radically new market environments have had a destabilising effect on organisations. These actors are having to open up to other partners coming from industries that are not part of their customary field of influence. They are also having to develop much more proactive relationships with public policymakers. Their R&D management and innovation organisation have been destabilised by these changes, which have led to the emergence within the automotive sector of "open innovation" experiments and practices worthy of full attention from social science researchers.

Studies focused on these issues within the automotive industry (and even in other sectors) merit further exploration. The same applies to research into new forms of the international organisation of design activities associated with the rising power of Indian, Brazilian, Russian or Chinese design centres.

Supplier industries play a fundamental role in structuring and restructuring the automotive industry. Their rise in the emerging countries constitutes one of the basic conditions enabling today’s emergence process and catalyses currently observed polarisation phenomena. This explains why authorities' "local contents" requirements have become one of the main levers used to drive local actors’ emergence. Symmetrically, assembly activities’ repatriation to some of the larger automotive countries has endangered (and on some occasions even led to the disappearance of) many supplier sites and companies.

While large global suppliers have accelerated their internationalisation trajectories and placed their competency at the disposal of both traditional prime contractors and the new manufacturers whose emergence they are trying to facilitate, the opposite movement can also be observed, involving the acquisition of European or American supplier companies by Indian or Chinese investors. The question then becomes which industrial and/or technological strategies are at work here; what role national and local public policy plays in these movements; and what kind of future landscape is being created through these changes. Clearly these are key questions both at an operational level but also in terms of the research perspective that the conference is trying to adopt. We would welcome relevant studies contributing to better understanding, including historical ones.

The 2008-2009 crisis revealed a startling gap between the different dynamics at work in the leading developed country markets and automotive industries and the same in China, Brazil or India. In turn, this led to more or less violent restructuring processes that have generally caused state authorities to intervene on what has at times been a massive scale. A comparative study of these restructuring processes well beyond the year 2009 could teach us a lot about this period by outlining (at least partially) the global hierarchy that is in the process of emerging.

Towards this end, there would be particular interest in studies of the public policies that are being implemented based on varying degrees of cooperation with industrial actors and aimed at encouraging such changes and/or adapting them more or less explicitly to the search for a sustainable mode of development for this industry and for mobility in general. Studies should be comparative in nature and cover the localisation and/or re-allocation choices that affect carmakers or suppliers’ production and design activities. Towards this end, special attention should be paid to the role of regional organisations, the opportunities they offer and the constraints and incentives that they may structure, whether in Asia, Europe and North America.