Manufacturing Time: Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795-2000 (review)

Manufacturing Time: Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795-2000. By Amy K. Glasmeier. New York: Guilford Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+311. $40.

Throughout the 1980s, the Swiss watch industry struggled to recover from a depression that had left it nearly bankrupt. For most of the twentieth century, watchmakers in the Swiss Jura, a mountainous region bordering France, had made most of the world's wristwatches. But the coming of the electronic wristwatch in the 1970s, marketed successfully by American and Asian competitors, had toppled the Swiss from leadership of the international market, slashed jobs in the Jura by the tens of thousands, and ruined hundreds of firms. Although a small group within the country's watch industry succeeded very quickly in making and selling electronic watches, entrenched practices slowed Swiss acceptance of electronics. The resulting crash undermined not only the country's watch manufacturing but also the extensive network that supported it--makers of precision machine tools, parts manufacturers, and enterprises devoted to repair and training.

Outside observers wondered why the Swiss had not foreseen the shift from a mechanical to an electronic world. As a major part of their country's industrial base vanished, concerned Swiss businesspeople looked beyond the watch industry to inquire whether the Jura, a region once so heavily committed to mechanical technology, could reinvent itself in order to participate in the microelectronics revolution.

These critical questions inspired this book, an overview of international competition in the watch industry for the past two hundred years. Amy Glasmeier describes how the lead in the watch industry shifted over time and space from Great Britain, to Switzerland, to the United States, back to Switzerland and then, in the age of electronics, to Japan and Hong Kong. This ambitious and useful synthesis looks for larger clues as to why industries fail or succeed.

Glasmeier wisely stops short of offering a prescription for crafting regional prosperity. In recent times, she observes, "regional fortunes are increasingly intertwined with global events that are largely beyond a single community's control" (p. 273). She also finds that policies devised to inspire regional innovation have only "modest effect" (p. 273), largely because industry insiders--as with most of the Jura watchmakers on the eve of the electronics revolution--usually have trouble noticing and responding to information coming from the myriad external sources that characterize today's global economy.

In two chapters preceding her chronological history of the industry, Glasmeier suggests that five external forces influence the dynamics of industrial development: technological change, the economic climate, wars and defense spending, industrial ideologies and structure, and regional culture. Her discussion relating to technological change is brief and theoretical, an explication of four categories of change: "incremental innovations," "radical innovations," "system-transforming innovations," and "technoeconomic paradigm shifts" (pp. 17-18). Readers looking for more details about watch and watchmaking technology will want to consult the secondary works cited as principal sources, especially David Landes's authoritative Revolution in Time (1983). Still, Manufacturing Time does provide tantalizing new glimpses into the origins and current operations of the hugely successful watch industry in Hong Kong, now the world's leader in low-priced watches.

Because this book seeks the causes of industrial change in large forces, readers will find almost no individual actors mentioned. One notable exception is Max Hetzel, whom Glasmeier correctly credits as the Swiss inventor of the tuning-fork oscillator, a replacement for the watch balance wheel that brought the first radical change in watch accuracy in centuries. But she misses a significant opportunity to explain that the Bulova Accutron, the watch incorporating Hetzel's invention, inspired the most intense international competition among watch companies in recent history. When it went on sale in 1960, the Accutron's technical superiority touched off a race to devise a watch that was even more accurate, a race joined by American, Swiss, and Japanese firms and won within the...