The conceptual distinction between bureaucratic, commitment, traditional, and professional employment systems highlights the variety of ways by which firms can manage their human resources. Within the current competitive environment, the core-periphery model predicts that firms will increasingly resort to a combination of commitment, traditional and professional systems, buffering their core workers and trading partners from environmental instability by resorting to unstable employment and contracting relations on a marginal basis.

The case study of the New York garment industry shows that this framework can help identify key dynamics in employment and contracting relations in a particular industry, and develop insights on broader changes in the economy. It also highlights the role of industry structure, inter-firm linkages, as well as labour market characteristics in determining firms' ability to stabilize employment and improve employees' welfare. These findings point to new directions to improve our conceptualization of organizational changes, by more consistently integrating these characteristics of firms' environment into the theoretical framework. In that perspective, the global commodity chain approach could be used to conceptualize the input-output structure, the governance structure, the geographical dimension as well as the institutional environment in which firms' activities are organized [Gereffi, 1994, 1996]. It can also help to assess the impact of globalization on local industries, by looking at the complementary roles of various locations within global production systems.

From a policy perspective, the New York case study points to the necessity of regulating and stabilizing inter-firm relations in order to improve employees' welfare in highly competitive environments. It also stresses the importance of community values in supporting a given system of rules, and shows how the disruption of local communities resulting from immigration and globalization processes can weaken institutional arrangements. In the American garment industry, innovative policies are being implemented at the local and national level to recreate a social consensus on labour issues. The government and major unions have sought to increase customers' awareness of retailers' and manufacturers' responsibility in sweatshop conditions, using the potentially negative impact of media campaigns as an incentive to promote the adoption of "codes of conducts" by the big firms. Union initiatives are also directed at informing workers of labour laws and union services by reaching out the new immigrant communities. In New York City, a tripartite association offers a variety of training programs in order to help contractors and production workers improve their skills and ability to compete in the global garment industry ^{(Endnote 2)} . These policy dimensions constitute another promising area for further research in relation to the transformation of organizations and employment.

Endnote 2:
See Palpacuer (1996) for a review of these policies.