Global Production and Communication

Production systems have been increasingly globalized over the past decades and production is very often "off-shored" – a process whereby firms in industrialized countries transfer value adding activities to countries with lower costs. This development raises several challenging problems both for managers of multinational corporations that are getting increasingly geographically spread as well as for the societies in which they act.

 

Key research objective

The overall research objective of this research focus area is to increase our understanding of global production, hereunder the environmental, cultural, social, economic, strategic and operational challenges companies and societies are facing in a globalized economy.

Doing so, the focus area researchers aim to contribute to the Globalization Research Programme's overall objective of "to increase the profile of NTNU's research by increasing the quality and quantity of research output on globalization-relevant topics".

This research focus area acts  as a hub to pool up the resources at NTNU on research relevant to Global Production and Communication. Researchers from Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Department of Social Anthropology, Department of History and Clasical Studies, Department of Production and Quality Engineeringand MARINTEK address issues relating to folloing themes:

• The internationalisation of firms
• Management of global production networks
• Innovation and entrepreneurship in global value chains
• Communication within global production systems and with their environment
• Understanding of CSR and its impacts on global production systems
• Social and economic effects of global production