Introduction

Industry and Innovation, Aug 2001 by Hancke, Bob, Amable, Bruno

This special issue of Industry and Innovation was conceived by us as a means of subjecting the recent performance of the French industrial system to a sustained economic-cum-institutional analysis, starting from the premise that the image of France portrayed in the contemporary literature is remarkably one-sided in its assessments and misses many of the more recent, more dynamic aspects of economic and industrial adjustment in that country. The issue draws on a collection of papers that were first presented at a workshop in Paris in February 2000, jointly organized by CEPREMAP and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB).1 The concern of all the contributors-which made for exceptionally rich debates during the workshop as well as useful guidelines for rewriting the papers-was that the turnaround in industrial performance in France had deep roots and that sustained attention to institutional details would be necessary to deal adequately with the changes recognized. This issue of I&I directly addresses these concerns and proposes an initial attempt at offering an alternative interpretation based on new empirical material on the French system of industrial innovation and adaptation.

Three threads connect the papers in this issue. The first is a concern to dissect and understand the dynamics of the French innovation system and its institutional underpinnings. All the participants in the workshop felt that a wide gap existed between the dominant views on France and what was actually going on in French industry. The leading interpretations picture a country caught in a self-reinforcing regressive dynamic: too much state stifles innovation, which hinders competitiveness, thus making exporting firms weaker, who therefore call on the state to resolve their problems for them and by doing so reinforce the vicious cycle. The papers in this issue, which themselves synthesize new primary and secondary material, offer a more complex view. First of all, the adjustment of French industry over the last two decades has been a success by any standard. Secondly, the image underlying the view of a blocked society which guided most analyses of post-war developments in France is in serious need of amendment: the shifts in product market strategies documented in these papers leave little doubt that the old simple mass-production model has been replaced by sophisticated product market strategies, which simultaneously exploit rapid innovation cycles, economies of scale and quasi-niche production. Thirdly, the continuities with the old system are important: the legacies of the centralized dirigiste model shine through in the new framework, as the papers on both the old and the new high-tech sectors demonstrate-but with varying effects.

A second concern which links the papers is methodological: a side-by-side treatment of developments in different parts of the French industrial innovation system allows us to gain a better grasp of the industry dynamics operating in technologies and sectors where France has traditionally been a strong performer, as well as in new sectors where the old French model appears less well suited. This special issue therefore brings together papers that deal with general issue areas, such as the link between macro- and microeconomic adjustment, changes in the corporate governance system and their impact on innovation strategies, and the reorganization of the financial system, as well as different industrial sectors (including the traditional massproduction sectors which were at the basis of the post-war growth miracle in France such as cars, steel and household appliances, complex network technologies which have been used by the French state to further technological prowess such as in armaments, fast trains and nuclear energy; and new sectors such as computers, software, and information technology generally).

A third overarching theme is how broad macro-level institutional and sectoral developments have influenced corporate reorganization and vice versa. Instead of seeing technological and organizational change as an autonomous process, the papers in this special issue explicitly introduce the institutional frameworks within which the actors are embedded and which guide their strategic choices in adjustment. Such an institutional perspective is certainly suggested by the case itself-after all, with the exception of the NICs, the state in France played a central coordinating role in economic development matched by few other OECD economies. But the papers in this special issue go beyond a narrow view of institutions and state structures. They support the broader argument that national institutional frameworks guide industrial adjustment and innovation toward different institutional equilibria. France has not become, and is not on the way toward becoming, a carbon copy of other national systems of industrial innovation, but has adapted its existing institutions in the process of finding a path into the 21st century. The French case thus stands as an important test of the widely held convergence thesis in political economy, and demonstrates the thesis to be false.