The New Old Economy: Networks, Institutions, and the Organizational Transformation of American Manufacturing

American manufacturing is in obvious crisis: the sector lost three million jobs between 2000 and 2003 as the American trade deficit shot to record highs. Manufacturers have increasingly decentralized productive responsibilities to armies of supplier firms, both domestic and abroad. Many have speculated as to whether or not manufacturing is even feasible in the United States, given the difficulties. Josh Whitford's book shows that discussion of this shift, in the media and in the academic literature, hits on the right issues - globalization, de-industrialization, and the outsourcing of production in marketized and in network relationships - but in an overly polarized way that obscures as much as it enlightens. Drawing on the results of extensive interviews conducted with manufacturers in the American Upper Midwest, Whitford shows that the range of possibilities is more complex and contingent than is usually recognized. Highlighting heretofore unexamined elements of
constraint, contradiction and innovation that characterize contemporary network production models, Whitford shakes received understanding in economic and organizational sociology, comparative political economy, and economic geography to reveal ways in which the American economic development apparatus can be adjusted to better meet the challenges of a highly decentralized production regime.


Author: Josh Whitford
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 01/05/2006
Pages: 228
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.11lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9780199286010

About the Author

Josh Whitford is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He received his MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin, where he was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (spent at the European University Institute in Italy) and the Lumpkin Award for the best dissertation in sociology, 2002-03. He then spent a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. His research cuts across disciplinary boundaries, contributing to and drawing on economic and organizational sociology, Comparative Political Economy, Economic Geography, and pragmatist social theory in analyses of the social, political, and institutional implications of productive decentralization (outsourcing). He has published papers in Economy and Society, Theory and Society, and Industry and Innovation.

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