Flexible industrial work in the European periphery: factory regimes and changing working class cultures in the Spanish steel industry

This article explores how two steel industry firms operating in northern Spain have adapted to neoliberalism and globalization. Despite their geographical proximity, the comparison between their different trajectories, production, and ownership profiles highlights how their distinct factory regimes, while becoming entangled in global market dynamics, have allowed the emergence of contrasting definitions of workers’ identities, labor politics, and livelihood strategies, raising questions concerning (1) processes of distribution of privileges, skills, and knowledge among the workforce, and (2) the shaping of social relations, values, and meanings that result in the formation of particular factory regimes. The unequal position of steelmaking in regional economies, and the effects of economic policies that framed social relations in each firm, evince important differences between them, including contrasting expressions of resistance, discipline, and sociality on the shop floor. Our comparison considers how particular factory regimes bring forward different prospects as these firms face further industrial transformation, restructuring, and an increasingly uncertain future

FirmNet: the scope of firms and the allocation of task in a knowledge-based economy

A prevalent claim is that we are in a knowledge economy. An increasingly influential argument is that the division of labour is becoming complex and firms can be viewed as networks of knowledge nodes, that is, sets of interacting individuals with key skills and competencies. Firms\u2019 competitive advantage relies in their ability to enact intellectual production processes that require bridging talents and integrate individual stocks of knowledge within an organisation. Building intra-organisational networks of skills, however, may request the enactment of social processes these latter being difficult to manipulate by the means of hierarchical control. The issue, then, becomes one of understanding the mechanisms that, within an organisation, may substitute hierarchical control in order to promote coordination among individuals bearing specific skills and facilitate knowledge integration processes. By the means of simulation experiments, we investigate how different hypotheses regarding individual decision-making explain emerging coordination within organisational contexts

Collaboration and competition inside an industrial district. A social capital approach.

What is the effect of foreign investment into traditional industrial districts? In this paper, we study longitudinal data on an Italian cluster in the textile industry to discuss this research question. We use modelling and computer simulation to present a number of testable hypotheses to underpin a theory of interaction behaviour among sub-populations in industrial districts. Our work was inspired by the lack of empirical research on this research problem, in terms of substitution dynamics. Our findings have important implications both for managers and entrepreneurs who are willing to speculate on industrial districts\u2019 future trends

Structure or flow? Designing knowledge based organizations

In knowledge-based economies production processes require joint effort by a number of individuals with very specific know-how and organizations play a role as integrator of a variety of individual knowledge. As knowledge specialization increases, however, the integration becomes a difficult endeavor. Escalating specialization and reliance on creativity of individual specialists may weaken the effectiveness of authority-based hierarchical mechanisms, this paper suggests that in order to design knowledge-based production processes, organizations need to design the flow, focusing on how reciprocal exchange emerges in networks of co-workers. We use a computer agentbased model \u2013 COOPNET \u2013 as a theoretical laboratory to explore the emergence of cooperation in an intra-organizational exchange network. In this virtual environment, we address how individual rewiring and reciprocation strategies interplay with the features of the organization context. More precisely, we test a number of hypotheses on how the freedom assigned to unilaterally terminate an exchange relationships interact with rewarding policies and organization topology and reinforces emerging aggregate cooperation