There is within the corporate world an evolving international restructuring race,between industrial complexes,that is set to intensify over the coming years.An industrial complex consists of suppliers,distributors,governments,financiers and trade unions.It is the reorganisation of the relationship between the core firm and the above components that is set to change before very long. In this book, Winfied Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder address many current debates on topics such as "Post-Fordism","globalisation" and "lean production".They also identify a number pf rival internationalisation strategies that have been adopted by different companies.Moreover,they present an abundance of new,as well as historical data,on the world's one hundred largest core companies.This data shows that none of the largest core firms is truly "global" or "borderless",and that virtually all of them in their history have benefited decisively from Governmental trade or industrial policies. The authors offer a highly interdisciplinary effort to link three previously isolated debates on industrial restructuring,globalisation and international trade policies.The Logic of International Restructuring is aimed at a wide academic,post-graduate and professional audience working in the areas of business,economics,organisational studies and international relations.

Beyond the Contract State challenges the foundations and effectiveness of economic rationalism. It argues that privatisation and contracting out are undermining the capacity of government to meet longer term social and economic objectives.

An ambitious volume that sets out to analyse the nature, contradictions and limits of neoliberal governance in the EU. The analysis covers the changing geopolitical and geo-economic context, the Lisbon agenda and the contestation and mobilization against the European project, such as manifested in the national resistance against the constitution.

An examination of the field of human resource development with a focus on Australia while maintaining an awareness of the international scene. The book shows how this development can help people, groups, teams, departments, public and private organizations develop their full potential.

This interdisciplinary volume provides a critical and multi-disciplinary review of current manufacturing processes, practices, and policies, and broadens our understanding of production and innovation in the world economy. Chapters highlight how firms

Corporations and Cultural Industries: Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News Corporation, by Scott Warren Fitzgerald, provides an introduction to the political economy of international media corporations. This text fills a fundamental gap in the critical media studies field, expanding on the relative paucity of academic studies. To ground the discussion, Fitzgerald focuses on the growth of three specific media conglomerates: Time Warner, Bertelsmann and News Corporation. Adopting an approach rooted in critical political economy, the book explains the corporations' growth through an engagement with broader social theories: the wider conditions of capital accumulation (especially theories of corporate competition and financialization); issues of institutional logic and corporate strategies; and the role of states as regulators, mediators of opposed interests, and facilitators of corporate expansion. The first section presents debates in social theory, addressing issues that pertain to cultural industries and dimensions in which they both challenge and extend these wider social theories. The second section presents detailed case studies of the three contemporary media 'mega companies' across the range of operations they coordinate, both within and outside the cultural industries. By analyzing the specifics and complexities of different media industries, Corporations and Cultural Industries examines how financialization processes re-gear the internal operations of media corporations in a manner that pits one sector against another. This book provides an in-depth study that can be used as stand-alone teaching resources or as a valuable supplement to a variety of media courses.

This study deals with the organisation of innovation projects of multinational companies. The focus is on learning processes which occur within the company group as well as those taking place between the company and its regional environment. This work establishes a bridge between organisational and regional learning.

Globalization and Social Change challenges conventional thinking regarding the inevitability of globalization. Rather than seeing globalization as 'the end station of capitalism', it presents the development of this phenomenon as a disruptive and conflicting process.

Local and regional development is an increasingly global issue. For localities and regions, the challenge of enhancing prosperity, improving wellbeing and increasing living standards has become acute for localities and regions formerly considered discrete parts of the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds. Amid concern over the definitions and sustainability of ‘development’, a spectre has emerged of deepened unevenness and sharpened inequalities in the development prospects for particular social groups and territories. Local and Regional Development engages and addresses the key questions: what are the principles and values that shape definitions and strategies of local and regional development? What are the conceptual and theoretical frameworks capable of understanding and interpreting local and regional development? What are the main policy interventions and instruments? How do localities and regions attempt to effect development in practice? What kinds of local and regional development should we be pursuing? This book addresses the fundamental issues of ‘what kind of local and regional development and for whom?’, frameworks of understanding, and instruments and policies. It outlines what a holistic, progressive and sustainable local and regional development might constitute before reflecting on its limits and political renewal. With the growing international importance of local and regional development, this book is an essential student purchase, illustrated throughout with maps, figures and case studies from Asia, Europe, and Central and North America.