International Colloquium 2012 - 30/31 May / 1 June - Krakow

 
The current restructuring of the global automotive industry is being driven by extremely rapid changes in the global geography of related production, marketing and (increasingly) design activities. The changes have had variable effects at different stages of the value chain; for different companies; and in different countries or regions worldwide.
 
Fundamentally, they all involve interlinked processes corresponding to the structuring of new automotive industries that are more or less autonomous in comparison with their predecessors – as well as restructuring actions that affect the older automotive industries and are uneven both in terms of their form and magnitude. As part of the new GERPISA International Research programme that is currently being developed and to prepare the opening of GERPISA’s 20th International Conference, we would like to invite social science researchers with an interest in the automotive industry to reflect upon this dual structuring/restructuring process.
 
More specifically, we are calling for empirical and/or conceptual studies focusing on the automotive industry’s new global geopolitical order and organised into seven main themes:

1. New kinds of mobility, new markets, new public policies;
2. Managing innovation, technological change and new business models
3. Manufacturer trajectories and strategies;
4. Supplier trajectories and strategies;
5. Emergence processes in the new automotive industries;
6. Restructuring processes affecting the European, American and Japanese automotive industries;
7. A new international division of labour and changes in employment relationships.
    

 
Each of these 7 themes refers to major transformations in the automobile industry and markets. The key question for researchers and actors is to evaluate the scope of these changes and the capability of the different actors to adapt to/or to master them. It calls for a renewed attention to the historical precedents that have marked the last 100 years of the life of this industry. Indeed, the comparison of major episodes of its emergence and transformation with what is happening today should provide new insights and perspectives on the on-going revolution. For this reason, on each theme, the communications of historians are highly welcome.
 
They might focus on:

• the choice of the thermic vehicle at the dawn of the 20th century,
• the transformations of the industry linked to the contestation of the American supremacy by Europe in the automobile after the war,
• the development of the Japanese or the Korean industry,
• the transformations of the employment relationships linked to the development of the “peripheral industries” as the Spanish or Portuguese ones in Europe or the Mexican one in North America.