This article reviews the carmaker-driven industrial restructurings that positioned First Tier Suppliers (henceforth FTS) at the heart of the world’s automobile system. It also draws necessarily temporary conclusions about their performance. The article is organised into three main sections....

The paper compares the research agendas of two different approaches of a meso-analysis which could combine industrial and spatial dynamics: the economics of proximity approach on one side, the regulation theory on the other side. Their specificities and divergences are identified in the first...

French banking expansion in China and South-East Asia had to respect the powerful influence of British banks there. From the 1860s French merchant and banking interests had been involved in Hong Kong business because of the colonial developments in Indochina and the links between this area and...

This paper analyzes the transformations of industrial vertical relationships, and more particularly the duality of the coordination modes within new industrial architectures. The paper aims to characterize relationship between the architect and the first-tier suppliers according to the strategic...

Prepared within the framework of the ESEMK project supported by the EU (FP6, Priority 7, CIT-CT-2004-506077 The European Socio-Economic Models of a Knowledge-based society), this paper discusses the linking between the variety of capitalism and the diversity of organisational forms for firms....

In this paper, we examine the hypothesis of the increasing role of regional level for designing and driving industrial politics in France. We consider the case of aerospace industry and Aquitaine region. We adopt a historical approach, and consider three key periods. The first corresponds to the...

This article proposes a definition of the a-spatial dimension of the proximity by adopting institutionalism point of view. In a first part, we distinguish institutional proximity and organisational proximity. According to the distinction suggested by Commons between institution and organization,...

Since 30 years new automotive countries develop in immediate periphery of the large regional blocks as Spain, Mexico, Czech Republic or Turkey. The products assembled in these new spaces are usually very innovative and originate in pioneering process from the organisational point of view. The...

One of the features of the model of organization which is gradually set up in the aeronautical activity is, for the airframe manufacturers, the passage of a statute of “aeronautical manufacturer” to “of architect-integrator of aeronautical systems”. The emergence of this model is not...

This paper tries to examine what are the conditions of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility in the first tier suppliers. These types of firms are specific because, if they are subcontractors, they are also big firms with a real capability to develop their own strategies. We discuss...