Manufacturing Possibilities: Creative Action and Industrial Recomposition in the United States, Germany, and Japan

by Gary Herrigel

Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies.

Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom up process driven by reflective social actors. This alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective, and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive, and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven
with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible.

Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities in advanced political economies has been unnecessarily limited.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2010

Reviews

[Jeffrey Hart · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a truly excellent book about changes in the global economy, focusing on three major industrial countries: the US, Germany, and Japan. The first part of the book deals with how the three countries coped with change in the global economy in two industries: motor vehicles and steel. The second part summarizes some of the excellent research funded by the Sloane Foundation in a highly general and accessible manner.

[Yisu Z. · Rating 5 out of 5]

非常棒的作品。纵观H师的几本书，从早期的传统产业经济，比较政治学，政治经济学分析，到2000前后开始反思自己的范式（同时代的其他学者也有人往同一个方向转型了，Zeitlin就是另一个好例子），到了这本书，完成一整个「实用主义转型」。这里他试图厘清新自由主义和制度主义各自的理论困境（5-8），并走出一条非常芝加哥的道路："Actors’ roles, their identities, the definition of interest, and behavior governing rules are all constituted simultaneously through deliberative interaction and struggle. "