ABSTRACT
For Western Europe and North America, a protracted crisis of the manufacturing industry dating from the early 1970s has stimulated vigorous debates over the nature of industrial restructuring and its implications for economic and social development path of these advanced capitalist economies (Piore and Sable 1984, Porter 1990, Hirst and Zeitlin 1989). In the case of the East Asian economies, popular myths touting the Asian model of economic growth have only recently been punctured by a widespread series of unsettling news of currency turmoil and looming recession. World markets are currently buzzing with conjectures that the global economic forces that have brought investment and prosperity to countries like Japan and Korea are now threatening to take them elsewhere.
