Firms restructuring on global markets: anticipating strategies and governance - Pichierri Since the late 1990s, restructuring anticipation is becoming a crucial issue, in consequence of the changing nature of restructuring and after a turning point in the process of European deindustrialisation. The current "non-standard" firms are becoming more and more interested by vertical disintegration or, better, by horizontal processes of "learning by monitoring". Strategic processes of restructuring are then requiring strategic forms of anticipation, like more social dialogue, early shared diagnosis and more "collective decisions", when the pressures of global markets are producing a multiplication of delocalisation and international fragmentation of activities, in production and services, with more "local games inside global players". This article is based on the results of an international research network on the processes of anticipating and accompanying the enterprises’ restructuring practices in 26 firms and 8 countries in the European Union. It is also based on the many discussions, among researchers, practitioners, and consultants, on transversal issues in six international workshops. Furthermore, there is a deep analysis about three important Italian cases of restructuring (Fiat, STMicroelectronics, and Sabaf-Lumezzane industrial district) which were among the benchmarking case studies for the Project and the European Commission promoting and financing the research (see the website: www.fse-agire.com).
Keywords: Anticipation, restructuring, deindustrialization.