The paper seeks to provide a quantitative and macroeconomic picture of the new geography of the automotive industry in Europe. Since ten new members joined the European Union in 2004, automakers and suppliers have changed their location strategies and now view the whole of Europe as a single...

Initial studies of modular manufacturing processes have shown that this dominant design required a fundamentally novel organisational structure of the industries. The underlying hypothesis of technological determinism merits a deeper exploration. The first part of the present paper aims at...

This paper proposes a new way for analysing the international trade of intermediaries good. We consider the case of automobile parts with the objective to cross analytic tools from international economics and industrial dynamics. Within the Economy of proximity framework, we propose a method for...

We present in this paper some results of a study about the globalization of the automotive First Tiers Suppliers. Our study is based on a sample of 30 suppliers, and we try to measure their degree of internationalization. We consider two types of variables: the sales and the location of...

This paper is a contribution to the analysis which criticises the weight of stakeholders to explain the development of Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives (CSR). We analyse the role of stakeholders to promote CSR in the automobile first tier suppliers. We study the impact of the clients,...

This article questions a terminology that is frequently used to describe automotive supply chains’ industrial architecture. Since vertical disintegration became a trend in the 1980s, this architecture has been represented using the image of the pyramid. Implicitly, authors have had the image...

The purpose of this paper is to present factual elements concerning the rise (decline) of French mega-suppliers. The study will focus on France’s three main mega-suppliers, all actors that have had a stake in carmakers’ modularisation strategies: Faurecia, Plastic Omnium and Valeo. Section 1...