ABSTRACT
For some years, increasing market saturation, stronger national and international competition, shorter product life cycles and the pressure exerted by rising internal costs have been forcing companies to develop new strategies to make their production, administration and distribution processes more flexible and economical. Of crucial importance in these strategies is the availability of computer-aided organization and control technologies in technology markets and the ways they get implemented. This chapter is concerned with the technological and organizational changes that companies have initiated since the mid 1980s in response to these new conditions. Based on the findings of our research, the assumption is made that these changes point to a new thrust in technological and organizational rationalization measures. What is decisive for these rationalization strategies is that they are no longer directed toward individual production sections or individual companies, but toward the production and distribution process as a whole. These developments are analytically and theoretically interpreted as a ‘new type of systemic rationalization’.
