Beginning with the key changes brought about in the economy by advanced technology and organizational and institutional innovations, this book elucidates their impact on industrial systems, accumulation, firms and the processes of European integration.;This approach enables the reader to establish the links in the conceptual jungle to real processes and to chart clearly, by eliminating chaos and chance factors, the interlocking grid of political destablization and economic marginalizaton that the advance of capitalist globalization has introduced in all countries. The author suggests an alternative approach founded upon a polycentric system of co-operation and solidarity to loosen the bonds of capitalism in the 21st century.

Attempts to explain the radical reshaping of the realtionship between the economy and society over the last 20 years struggled against the inadequacy of the traditional tools posited on market streamlining and flexibility. Bruno Amoroso reconstructs the pattern connecting community, human needs, modes of production, institutions and markets. In the light of the unsustainable costs of a globalization of the three-quarters of the planet, he proposes an alternative approach founded upon a polycentric system of cooperation and solidarity--the only one capable of transforming capitalism in the 21st century.