Between Globalization and Regionalization: What is the Future of the Automobile Industry?

Abstract

Introduction: If the challenge facing automobile producers in the 1980s was how to change their industrial model, that of the 1990s has been how to reorganize internationally. Of course, internationalization has been one of the industry's characteristics since its inception, and international trade has accounted for a higher proportion of sales than it does today at several periods in the past (Bardou, Chanaron, Fridenson and Laux, 1982). Globalization has neither been achieved nor is it irreversible and unavoidable. Yet the current tendency towards internationalization differs from previous phases, and in particular, it differs from the situation in the 1970s and 1980s analyzed by GERPISA in one of its initial research projects (Gerpisa, 1984). In part, this is due to the global context of deregulation and the emergence of new growth poles, but above all because of its origins. The clash between the industrial models used by companies and between national growth models seen over the last twenty years has destabilized the wage-labour nexus and, in turn, the markets of many mature countries, including countries that have benefited from this confrontation. Companies can no longer rely upon markets that are relatively predictable in terms of the level and type of demand....