New Organisational Forms in Traditional Industries: The Process of Change in the Metalworking Sector

Recent debates have suggested a wide variety of new forms for the nineteen nineties. The work of Piore and Sabel has stimulated a wide‐ranging debate about the relevance of a return to a craft form of production organisation under the guise of ‘flexible specialisation’ as a response to the deregulation of world markets. Others, such as Miles and Snow have been more impressed by the unbundling of vertically integrated businesses into ‘dynamic networks’ in a shift from hierarchical to market transaction governance within the production process. For the MIT team working on the corporation of the nineties, information technology is the main force towards the ‘networked organisation’. Advocates of ‘total quality management’, ‘lean production’ and the ‘flexible firm’ are all arguing that there has been a profound seachange in our established conceptions of organisational form.