Introduction: Ten Years On, What Have We Learnt?

GERPISA’s first publication — One Best Way? Trajectories and Industrial Models of the World’s Automobile Producers (Freyssenet et al., 1998) — was an analysis of automobile firm trajectories since the 1970s. Its aim was to test the received wisdom at the time that things would necessarily converge towards ‘lean production’, being one conceptualisation of the ‘Japanese productive model’ that some people expected to ‘change the world’ (Womack et al., 1990). The study ultimately showed that three and only three firms (Honda, Toyota and Volkswagen) were consistently profitable during slow growth years. Moreover, they pursued completely different profit strategies and productive models. Thus, instead of corroborating a convergence hypothesis, it offered a renewed differentiation of corporate trajectories and models. This collective research project, like others relating to the transfer of productive models from one country to another (Boyer et al., 1998) and to the organisation of production and of work (Durand et al., 1999; Lung et al., 1999) or offering a complete history of the automobile industry (Boyer and Freyssenet, 1999, 2006), enabled the compilation of a table comprising different automaker profit strategies, the societal conditions in which they operate, and the productive models they have historically implemented thanks to specific‘company government compromises’ (Boyer and Freyssenet, 2002). This table became GERPISA’s main tool of analysis and was further enriched and transformed by subsequent research.