ABSTRACT
The 1980s were, in the ICs and the advanced DCs, a phase of change at the microlevel. What emerged was a new best practice of production, intra-firm R&D, and inter-firm interaction which can be paraphrased with the terms lean production, simultaneous engineering, and just-intime. This new best practice breaks with the conventional TayloristFordist paradigm. This presents a challenge for the for the Western ICs no less pressing than it is for the DCs, because this process is rendering obsolete deeply rooted ways of seeing and acting. Approximation to the new best practice is furthermore rendered all the more complicated by the fact that the pending changes are not restricted to the firm level. They extend as well to inter-firm relations and the mesolevel.
