My Research Fields from 1966 to the present

 

The research field on industry and productive systems [1977-1980 and 1997-2010]

 

The works carried out in 1960-75 by the researchers of the IREP-Grenoble, in response to commissions for states in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb as well as for the French State, led me to mark out certain elements of the industrial economy from my very first works on the international economy: the concept of ‘commodity-group’ (ensemble-marchandise), in 1973; the concept of branch that the capital cycle travels through, in 1975; ….

With Procès de production et crise du capitalisme (The production process and the crisis of capitalism) [1977], as well as in Travail et production (Labour and Production) [1978], I proposed an analysis framework of the industrial economy based on:
the breakdown of the productive system into branches, channels, sectors, … among which a classification of sectors in terms of capital goods, intermediary goods, wage goods;
linked to the establishment of different price systems (market prices, production prices) coupled to modes of functioning (profit rate maximisation, tendency towards a differentiation of profit rates, tendency towards the profit rates' equalization), as well as to value creation;
with a hierarchical organization of the productive systems on a world level;
the articulation of the branches and sectors to the labour-processes in various distinct processes of valorisation and accumulation;
the articulation of the branches and sectors to domestic labour-processes, notably with respect to the exteriority of the force de travail and the consumption of wage goods.

This framework is then applied in a variety of forms to the crisis of capitalism of the late 1970s [Palloix 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984].

After this, many new phases of research in industrial economics followed:
the first in 1997 [Palloix, Rizopoulos] and 2002 [Palloix], with an attempt to connect the initial structuralist framework to institutional economics, and in particular the old American institutionalism (Veblen, Commons);
the second in 2002 [Girard, Palloix], with the proposal of the concept of ‘industrial ensemble’ so as to interpret the evolution of job structures in the greater Paris Basin;
the third in 2004 [Palloix], with the attempt to ‘overturn’ the structuralist framework, used until now as industrial structures of production/reproduction, into ‘market’ structures that firms take over to conduct their strategy.

My current research aims to bring together these elements in a new framework of international industrial economics.

 

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