1. Chapter 10: GLOBALIZATION, THE COMPANY AND THE WORKPLACE: Some interim evidence from the auto industry in Britain.
- Author
-
Stewart, Paul and Garrahan, Philip
- Subjects
INTERNATIONAL business enterprises ,AUTOMOBILE industry ,INTERNATIONAL relations ,GLOBALIZATION ,INTERNATIONAL trade - Abstract
The article informs that the basis of globalization is that new economic forces are marginalizing the nation state. However, the argument that capital is now sufficiently organized to exercise increasingly unrestrained power and influence across the industrial world needs to be applied to particular national circumstances with a great deal of caution. In fact, the state remains a major force for change in the late twentieth century and this view, at the core of critical perspectives on transformations in economic relations, necessitates placing limits on globalization. The conception of globalization comes in many shapes and forms and in the automotive industry it has been represented in the canon of the Japanization school. Beginning in the UK in the late 1980s, this has been the dominant form within which developments in the automotive industry have been judged. The study of manufacturing organizations in contemporary economies has been exemplified, if not led, by the attention paid to the automobile sector. This derives from the cultural, political and social significance of the automobile for consumption and production models of life in modern capitalism. The automobile's meaning is inextricably linked to notions of modernization, and the industry, which produces the automobile, both generates and satisfies individual consumer demand.
- Published
- 1997