Recently, the international division of labour in industrial production has grown increasingly more volatile. The separation between 'high-end' tasks undertaken in the traditional core economies and 'low-end' tasks undertaken in newly emerging economies has become increasingly blurred. The new dynamics and unpredictability of actor and process configurations in internationalized production bring new challenges for research in economic geography, regional economics and management sciences. The allocation of R&D and production mandates within or between enterprises, the setting up, closing down, purchase or sale of subsidiaries at different localities, the shifting patterns of collaborative innovation, together with newly evolving forms of capitalism, all appear to interact in ways not seen before. It appears we have entered a new era termed 'industrial transition'. This book forms the first approach toward conceptualising the term and compiling illustrative empirical underpinnings. Contributions by an international set of renowned economic geographers highlight the major features and case studies of 'industrial transition' and address various questions that matter for the future of our global economy: How are regions and localities affected by the shift of product mandates? In which ways do changes differ between industrial sectors and economic regions? How can regions and localities adequately prepare for or react to foreseeable changes; and how can regional resilience and response capacities be built and enhanced?

Examines underlying factors behind the rise and decline of Dayton, Ohio, an archetypal Rust-Belt city, ultimately proposing a plan for revival.

This seminal edited collection examines the impact of austerity and economic crisis on European cities. Whilst on the one hand the struggle for competitiveness has induced many European cities to invest in economic performance and attractiveness, on the other, national expenditure cuts and dominant neo-liberal paradigms have led many to retrench public intervention aimed at preserving social protection and inclusion. The impact of these transformations on social and spatial inequalities – whether occupational structures, housing solutions or working conditions – as well as on urban policy addressing these issues is traced in this exemplary piece of comparative analysis grounded in original research. Unequal Cities links existing theories and debates with newer discussions on the crisis to develop a typology of possible orientations of local government towards economic development and social cohesion. In the process, it describes the challenges and tensions facing six large European cities, representative of a variety of welfare regimes in Western Europe: Barcelona, Copenhagen, Lyon, Manchester, Milan, and Munich. It seeks to answer such key questions as: What social groups are most affected by recent urban transformations and what are the social and spatial impacts? What are the main institutional factors influencing how cities have dealt with the challenges facing them? How have local political agendas articulated the issues and what influence is still exerted by national policy? Grounded in an original urban policy analysis of the post-industrial city in Europe, the book will appeal to a wide range of social science researchers, Ph.D. and graduate students in urban studies, social policy, sociology, human geography, European studies and business studies, both in Europe and internationally.

Technology is not an end in itself, but a way of satisfying human wants. It shows us how to solve the age-old economic problem of surviving and pros pering in a hard world. But to optimize the benefits of technological advance requires an understanding of how it happens. The purpose of this book is to provide some of that understanding. The subject is so enormous and so intertwined with every human activity that a small selection of it, and that from a special viewpoint, is inevitable. The selection of subject matter has been, of course, conditioned by what interests me and is somewhat heterogeneous. However, it is connected by two major themes. The first is that it emphasizes the dynamic nature of technology, in the sense that it must be approached as a process evolving in time that can often be described in quantitative terms. The second is that I have chosen topics that I believe are essential for a strategic sense of how to plan for, execute, and respond to technological change. These two themes complement each other because the strategic sense requires an appreciation of the dynamics and the dynamics naturally lead to a consideration of how to deal with technology so that it can be used to achieve human objectives. The unifying thought behind the book is that technological change has a systemic as well as an idiosyncratic aspect.

Renowned New South booster Henry Grady proposed industrialization as a basis of economic recovery for the former Confederacy. Born in 1850 in Athens, Georgia, to a family involved in the city's thriving manufacturing industries, Grady saw firsthand the potential of industrialization for the region. In Transition to an Industrial South, Michael J. Gagnon explores the creation of an industrial network in the antebellum South by focusing on the creation and expansion of cotton textile manufacture in Athens. By 1835, local entrepreneurs had built three cotton factories in Athens, started a bank, and created the Georgia Railroad. Although known best as a college town, Athens became an industrial center for Georgia in the antebellum period and maintained its stature as a factory hub even after competing cities supplanted it in the late nineteenth century. Georgia, too, remained the foremost industrial state in the South until the 1890s. Gagnon reveals the political nature of procuring manufacturing technology and building cotton mills in the South, and demonstrates the generational maturing of industrial laboring, managerial, and business classes well before the advent of the New South era. He also shows how a southern industrial society grew out of a culture of social and educational reform, economic improvements, and business interests in banking and railroading. Using Athens as a case study, Gagnon suggests that the connected networks of family, business, and financial relations provided a framework for southern industry to profit during the Civil War and served as a principal guide to prosperity in the immediate postbellum years.

As the greatest coal-producing and consuming nation in the world, China would seem an unlikely haven for wind power. Yet the country now boasts a world-class industry that promises to make low-carbon technology more affordable and available to all. Conducting an empirical study of China's remarkable transition and the possibility of replicating their model elsewhere, Joanna I. Lewis adds greater depth to a theoretical understanding of China's technological innovation systems and its current and future role in a globalized economy. Lewis focuses on China's specific methods of international technology transfer, its forms of international cooperation and competition, and its implementation of effective policies promoting the development of a home-grown industry. Just a decade ago, China maintained only a handful of operating wind turbines—all imported from Europe and the United States. Today, the country is the largest wind power market in the world, with turbines made almost exclusively in its own factories. Following this shift reveals how China's political leaders have responded to domestic energy challenges and how they may confront encroaching climate change. The nation's escalation of its wind power use also demonstrates China's ability to leapfrog to cleaner energy technologies—an option equally viable for other developing countries hoping to bypass gradual industrialization and the "technological lock-in" of hydrocarbon-intensive energy infrastructure. Though setbacks are possible, China could one day come to dominate global wind turbine sales, becoming a hub of technological innovation and a major instigator of low-carbon economic change.

Manufacturing in Transition looks at the current state of British manufacturing within the global economy and asks whether manufacturing matters in the twenty first century.

This report builds on work presented in the OECD’s 2019 report Regions in Industrial Transition: Policies for People and Places. It considers industrial transition as a complex and enduring challenge in regional development that traditional policy levers have not always been unable to satisfactorily address.

Providing the fullest English-language account of Japanese textiles, Dennis L. McNamara explores the entire sweep of the industry, from the factory to the high-fashion brokerage to the policymaking circle. Tracing the strategies by which the textile industry has survived, he provides a distinctive view of Japanese capitalism in a climate of change. McNamara reconstructs a world riven by the competing interests of state and capital, firm and industry, labor and management, mill and merchant. We encounter giant "mogul" companies and upstart independent "mavericks" - such firms as Toray, Toyobo, Itochu, Tsuzuki, Kondobo, Onward, and Renown - all hustling to restructure for survival.

In Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England, Michael Andrew Žmolek offers the first in-depth study of the evolution of English manufacturing from the feudal and early modern periods within the context of the development of agrarian capitalism. With an emphasis on the relationship between Parliament and working Britons, this work challenges readers to 'rethink' the common perception of the role of the state in the first industrial revolution as essentially passive. The work chronicles how a long train of struggles led by artisans resisting efforts by employers to transform production along capitalist lines, prompted employers to appeal to the state to suppress this resistance by coercion.