Originally published in 2005. This book examines how regional industries use different networks on various geographical scales in order to withstand increasing competition in a globalising world. It argues that new forms of global governance of networked industries are emerging, in particular in those areas that have only recently been incorporated into the global economy such as Eastern Europe, Asia and Southern Africa. The book addresses a number of issues, including the different forms of institutional arrangements that contribute to the formation of heterogeneous global industrial networks. It also raises the issue of national institutions that still matter in network formation. The focus of the book is on how to improve regional and sectoral competitiveness in a global context and it suggests this is best achieved by a close analysis of global linkages, an evolutionary perspective on processes taking place, and a more differentiated view on globalisation.

Originally published in 2005. This book examines how regional industries use different networks on various geographical scales in order to withstand increasing competition in a globalising world. It argues that new forms of global governance of networked industries are emerging, in particular in those areas that have only recently been incorporated into the global economy such as Eastern Europe, Asia and Southern Africa. The book addresses a number of issues, including the different forms of institutional arrangements that contribute to the formation of heterogeneous global industrial networks. It also raises the issue of national institutions that still matter in network formation. The focus of the book is on how to improve regional and sectoral competitiveness in a global context and it suggests this is best achieved by a close analysis of global linkages, an evolutionary perspective on processes taking place, and a more differentiated view on globalisation.

This book is the product of four years of collaborative work within the framework of the European Science Foundation's Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe (RURE) programme. With one exception, all of the chapters have been prepared by participants in RURE - the exception being that commissioned from Conti and Enrietti on Fiat and Italy to provide a fuller coverage of changes in the main automobile producing companies and countries of Europe. A - perhaps the - central theme around which the RURE programme was conceived is that the restructuring of the production system lies at the heart of the changing map of Europe. Equally, it continues to be the case that the automobile industry lies at the cutting edge of the search for viable new models of production. Some eighty years ago the automobile industry occupied a pivotal position in the transition from craft to mass production - indeed "Fordism" came to denote not just a particular micro-economic model of production organisation in the factory but a macro-scale model of economic development, characterized by a particular pattern of relations between mass production, mass consumption and national state regulation. From the late 1960s, however, it became increasingly clear that Fordism as a macro-scale model of advanced capitalist development was reaching its limits.