Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development

The paradigm of mass production has given way to radically new forms of organizing industrial production based primarily on the need to foster continuous redesign of products and processes in the face of intensified competition. This change, which is designed to engender continuous adaptive learning in production systems, requires considerable organizational flexibility. The mass production systems constructed in the early post-war period foundered in the face of new forms of competition which put a premium on learning and flexibility.
Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development brings together the principal theoreticians on these subjects. Each paper is written by an international authority and captures the state-of-the-art thinking on the organization of production, technical change, the international and regional consequences of the new production paradigms, and the possible pathways to industrial and regional development in the 1990s.