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Any kind of production flow is obtained not from individual production organizations but from a more or less widespread Production Network of interconnected production modules located in different places and times. All of these modules are, consciously or not, necessarily connected, interacting and cooperating in a coordinated way to combine and arrange, step by step, the factors, materials, components, manpower, machines and equipment to obtain flows of products’ final goods, in particular’ and to sell these where there is a demand for them. The purpose of this paper is to determine, in logical and formal terms, the minimum conditions that bring about the formation of production networks and to discover the laws that explain their dynamics over time.

At the global level, the continuous and accelerated economic progress of mankind is witnessed. There is an increase in the quantity and quality of satisfied and yet to be satisfied needs, of attained and yet to be attained aspirations. The increase in productivity and in quality has become unstoppable and appears to guide the other variables in the system. It is natural to ask who produces and governs these phenomena. It does indeed seem there is a Ghost in the “Production” machine whose invisible hand produces growing levels of productivity and quality, increases the quality and quantity of satisfied needs and aspirations and reduces the burden of work, thus producing increasingly higher levels of progress in the entire economic system. This conceptual framework gives a simple answer: there is nothing metaphysical about this evolution towards unstoppable and irreversible progress, and it is produced by the spontaneous genesis and activity of selfish nodes and governed by the rules and laws of the production networks.

The author has identified ten “rules of selfish behavior” on the part of the nodes, whose application necessarily and inevitably produces three evolutionary dynamic processes “which refer to the network as an entity” which the author has called the “rules of the production networks” to emphasize their cogency: continual expansion, elasticity-resiliency and continual improvement in performance. The cognitive and creative processes that characterize the nodes do not allow us to predict the actual evolution of production networks; nevertheless, if it is assumed that nodes “consciously or not” follow the 10 “rules of selfish behavior”, then several typical trends, or behavioural schema, can be deduced which the author has called as the “laws of networks”, to highlight their apparent inevitability and cogency.

More than any other structure, Production Networks display Holland’s features and Arthur’s properties as their modules, viewed as autonomous entities with cognitive functions, represent a collectivity of agents that interact and exchange information with their environment to maintain over time their internal processes through adaptation, self-preservation, evolution and cognition, making individual and collective decisions as part of a network of micro behaviours.

This new conception of production through production networks, which takes into account the “rules” and “laws” regulating their behaviour, also sheds new light on the development of networks and their natural tendency to become globalized.

Although the concept of a network is becoming more popular in economic and business studies, it is yet to see an interpretation of production as deriving exclusively from the actions of increasingly larger networks. This paper presents an integrated view of production that does not discard the notion that production is carried out by organizations and companies but introduces the broader concept of the integration among organizations, which must be interpreted as nodes of a broader network that produces the flows of all the components needed to obtain the flow of a specific product. This represents an innovative view that will help us in understanding the difficulties policymakers encounter in governing production and controlling the basic variables that characterize it, specifically productivity, quality, quantity, prices and value. This perspective also allows to derive rules and laws for the behaviour of production networks that appear to be cogent and unvarying over time.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

In this chapter, we have presented four case studies of the firms which are operating in the medium complete adapting countries. The four cases are Arvidsson Textile Share Company in Estonia, Partec Rockwool in Lithuania, Accel Share Company in Lithuania and Ragn-Sells in Estonia. The case studies are prepared following the structure of the theoretical framework applied in this book. We have found out that the performance of Arvidsson Textile Share Company is successful as it matches the expectations if the partners and it has remained to be more or less the same since its establishment. The performance of Partec Rockwool was also successful from the very beginning until it was replaced by the fully owned firm. Accel Share Company's operations in Lithuania was successful from the very beginning as it found the right people with the right competence in the local market. In the case of Ragn-Sells in Estonia, the alliance was successful but not up to the full expectation.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

Learning behaviors related to quality improvement in manufacturing systems (i.e. reduction of defectiveness over production cycles) are widely investigated. Many different approaches have been introduced to describe the link between the learning mechanism and quality performance of a plant. In a previous study by the same authors, a set of learning “composition laws” for two basic structures were defined to provide a tool to forecast the behavior of complex manufacturing systems composed by a network of elementary processes. This paper presents an empirical investigation about these learning composition laws on a real case in the field of automotive exhaust‐systems manufacturing.

In recent years, much has been discussed about new consumer practices based on the sharing economy. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to map out the international scientific production on sharing economy.

The research adopted a descriptive qualitative approach. Based on a sample of 95 documents collected in the Scopus database, analyses of bibliometric and sociometric indicators were carried out, as well as content analyses were conducted to identify the main thematic categories in the field.

The results show that sharing economy is an emerging topic, and of late, the research in this field has grown rapidly. The study provides a mapping of top journals and authors, works of greatest impact and of co-authorship, co-citation and bibliographic coupling networks, which evidence the low intensity of researcher’s interactions and scientific production dispersion in the field. The main subjects found in the sharing economy literature are determinants, motivations and barriers, sharing economy impacts, regulation, models and frameworks, critical approach and entrepreneurship and sharing-based new businesses.

The analyses did not take into account the timing perspective. Further research could undertake a timeline-based approach in order to present direct citation networks and to relate works according to the year when they were published.

The study innovates by identifying the main subjects in the sharing economy literature, as well as by presenting network analysis for some bibliometric indicators, complementing previous research in the field.