How and why does an industry change, or not change, over time? Today major technological and geopolitical discontinuities are forcing industry leaders, policymakers, consultants, and scholars to pay new attention to industry dynamics. This attention, however, often lacks context and awareness of the significant differences across industries and their dynamics across time and across locations. The Oxford Handbook of Industry Dynamics provides that context. With eight chapters on conceptual frameworks and over thirty chapters providing long-term, in-depth overviews of a single industry or groups of industries by scholarly experts, this Handbook is an essential resource, highlighting the heterogeneity of industry dynamics, but also revealing striking and sometimes surprising similarities.The industries covered range from those that pre-date the very concept of an industry, including agriculture and textiles, to those that are barely decades old, such as mobile telephone equipment and cryptocurrency. The Handbook also includes chapters by leading scholars (including Gary Gereffi, David Teece, and James Utterback) on how their own research on industries has developed over time. Complemented by an extensive overview of how the concept of industry itself has evolved, the Handbook reveals the wide variety of ways in which scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have thought about industry and how that thinking has developed over time. The volume provides new insights into both the importance and the complexity of the concept of industry and into the range of perspectives taken by those who study and use this ubiquitous and yet often taken-for-granted term.
