Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies.
Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom up process driven by reflective social actors. This alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective, and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive, and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible.
Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities in advanced political economies has been unnecessarily limited.

This book is about the way in which industrial production in Germany is conditioned by social and political factors. Herrigel emphasizes regional, organizational, and policy dimensions of the development of German industry from the seventeenth century to the present. The argument is distinctive because it pays so much attention to small and medium-sized firms, and because it suggests that Germany does not have a single coherent national system of industrial governance. This social constructivist point of view presents a direct challenge to the Gerschenkronian, Schumpetarian, and Chandlerian approaches to Germany's economic history.

A new and distinctive analysis of Americanization in European and Japanese industry after the Second World War. The distinguished international contributors analyse the autonomous and creative role of local actors in selectively adapting US technology and management methods to suit local conditions and, strikingly, in creating new hybrid forms that combined indigenous and foreign practices in unforeseen, yet remarkably competitive ways. Of compelling interest in particular to historians and social scientists concerned with the dynamics of post-war economic growth and industrial development.

This book is about the way in which industrial production in Germany is conditioned by social and political factors. Herrigel emphasizes regional, organizational, and policy dimensions of the development of German industry from the seventeenth century to the present. The argument is distinctive because it pays so much attention to small and medium-sized firms, and because it suggests that Germany does not have a single coherent national system of industrial governance. This social constructivist point of view presents a direct challenge to the Gerschenkronian, Schumpetarian, and Chandlerian approaches to Germany's economic history.

Throughout the evolution of the modern world economy, new models of productive efficiency and business organization have emerged-in Britain in the nineteenth century, in the US in the early (and perhaps late) twentieth century, and in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. At each point foreign observers have looked for the secrets of success and best practice, and initiatives have been taken to transmit and diffuse. This book looks in detail at 'Americanization' in Europe and Japan in the post-war period. A group of distinguished international scholars explore in depth the processes, the ideologies, and the adaptations in a number of different countries (the UK, France, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Germany) and different sectors (engineering, telecommunications, motor vehicles, steel, and rubber). The book is rich in historical analysis based on careful research. This provides the basis for informed and subtle theoretical analysis of the complexities of the diffusion of business organization and the powerful influences of Americanization in this century. It will be of compelling interest to historians, social scientists and business academics concerned with the dynamics of economic and corporate growth, industrial development, and the diffusion of productive and business models.