The Internationalization Process: European Firms in Global Competition

How are the European corporations responding to international competition? What are the implications for future corporate structure, employment and uneven development? These are the central concerns of The Internationalization Process, developed from a four-year research programme, ′Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe′, carried out under the aegis of the European Science Foundation.

The carefully selected group of corporate case studies demonstrates how changing functional and geographical divisions of labour are related to complex forces operating within and beyond

the confines of Europe. The case studies examined range from the telecoms supplier Alcatel to the machine-tool producers Gildemeister and Maho, from the pharmaceuticals giant SmithKline Beecham to the privatized steel producer British Steel. Building from a shared conceptual base, the eight corporate case studies illustrate how internationalization strategies are related to the nature of the firm′s product or service and to the characteristics of its production process.

Peter Dicken is recognized as a leading world authority on economic globalization. He is Emeritus Professor of Geography in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, UK, and has held visiting academic appointments at universities and research institutes throughout the world. He is an Academician of the Social Sciences, a recipient of the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), the Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Uppsala, Sweden.

Jamie Peck is Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy, Distinguished University Scholar, and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Previously, he was a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Manchester. With research interests in urban restructuring, geographical political economy, labor studies, the politics of policy formation and mobility, and economic geography, he is currently working on theories of capitalist restructuring and the political economy of neoliberalization. His recent books include Offshore: Exploring the Worlds of Global Outsourcing (2017, Oxford), Fast Policy: Experimental statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (2015, Minnesota, with Nik Theodore), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography (2012, Wiley-Blackwell, coedited with Trevor Barnes & Eric Sheppard), and Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (2010, Oxford). Jamie Peck is the managing editor of EPA: Economy and Space and the editor in chief of the Environment and Planning journals.