ABSTRACT
During the past 20 years or so, research in this area – in formerly planned economies and beyond – has been heavily influenced by the GCC approach. This approach provided researchers with useful insights into the reconfiguration of industrial dynamics in increasingly integrated networks of production and distribution. These insights have been used to inform policy-making by transnational organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF 2004), UNCTAD (2003; 2004), the World Bank (2004) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2004). As is always the case with approaches that dominate the research and policy agenda, GCCs have been the focus of intense scrutiny (Raikes et al. 2000; Henderson et al. 2002; Coe et al. 2004, Palpaceur et al. 2005). Among the plethora of critiques, Smith et al. (2002)
advanced the thesis that there is ‘a tendency to neglect the dynamics and fluidity of organizational forms in GCC analysis ... [and] [t]here is consequently little detailed analysis of complexity in either intra-or inter-organizational relations’ (Smith et al. 2002). Advocates of the GCC approach acknowledged the importance of the difficulties created by the relatively high level of abstraction of early works and provided a number of correctives (Gereffi and Mayer 2004; Bair 2005; Gereffi et al. 2005; Neidik and Gereffi 2006). This constitutes the point of departure for this chapter. We set out to explore the micro-dynamics of industrial change. The enterprise is the subject at the heart of our inquiry, whilst deciphering the strategies adopted by firms and their implications for external linkages and performance constitute key areas of our work.
