ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the technological and organizational changes that companies have initiated since the mid 1980s in response to these new conditions. An important focus of research is new division of labour and reorganization of intra-company and inter-company networks arising through systemic rationalization processes. The data-based integration of company-external processes imply changes in inter-company division of labour and inter-company relations hitherto shaped primarily by market mechanisms. Today, changes in inter-company division of labour, particularly the transformation of relations between manufacturing and supplier firms, play central role worldwide. To understand new rationalization strategies, it is necessary to grasp the central importance that restructuring of inter-company divisions of labour has for fundamental social and economic transformations in capitalist industrial societies. Systemic rationalization is directed primarily toward the control of sequential dependencies of various subprocesses, toward the organization in each individual subprocess of concrete technical, material and information technology (IT)-based interfaces, and their data-based interdependence to other subprocesses in production and administration.
