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Manufacturing Possibilities: Creative Action and Industrial Recomposition in the United States, Germany, and Japan
Contributor(s): Herrigel, Gary (Author)
ISBN: 019955773X     ISBN-13: 9780199557738
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
OUR PRICE:   $156.75  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: September 2010
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Business & Economics | Industries - General
- Business & Economics | Organizational Behavior
- Business & Economics | Corporate & Business History - General
Dewey: 338.476
Physical Information: 1" H x 6.2" W x 9.2" (1.35 lbs) 296 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
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.