II. Manufacturing Decline or
Transformation
From manufacturing to transportation logistics: Eurogate at the harbour Hamburg, Germany.
Production processes continue to change rapidly and radically. The implication for firms, employees, working learning and development skills and national economies are far-reaching. Indeed, the capitalist economic system is founded upon processes and practices that are fundamentally dynamic. The pace of social and economic change has accelerated over the last thirty years in response to a number of major technological revolutions, but also economic restructuring and radical alterations to the organisation of production systems. Many of these changes can by subsumed under the term globalisation. Discourses of globalisation or internationalisation, however, perhaps hide more than they reveal. It is important to identify the drivers behind alterations in firm behaviour and for the development of new productions systems, or alterations to existing systems, that are intended to exploit new markets or differential comparative advantage. Some of the drivers are well-established processes related to competition and the evolving division of labour (Walker, 1985: Sayer and Walker, 1992) while others represent radical alterations to production systems, for example the increased importance of technology-enabled service activities and functions in production systems. Since the formation of a capitalist economic system human society has been founded upon the creation of wealth and subsequently taxation systems that are intended
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