ABSTRACT
There is an increasingly widespread belief that the ground-rules of industrial competitiveness have altered since the “golden age” of the postwar boom. A wide set of literature addresses these issues and contrasts the old paradigm (“mass production”, “fordism”, “machinofacture”, “the old competition”) with the new (“flexible specialisation”, “postfordism”, “systemofacture”, “the new competition”). A central feature of the new production system is the organisation of production.
