CHAPTER 10

New Technologies: Productions Systems, Management, and Labor

Quietly, six revolutions took place in the auto industry over the past 30 years. The first was the transformation from a mature and comparatively low-tech industry to today’s high-technology-driven one. This we traced in Chapter 3. The second was the reconfiguration of the manufacturing value chain around suppliers, today the locus of most manufacturing employment and increasingly of R&D. That theme runs throughout the book, but was a specific focus of Chapters 6 to 9. The third is a new geography, both within major markets, and with the rise of new producers, above all China. This was the topic of Chapters 4 to 5. The fourth, building over the past 30 years, is the compression ...

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