Resilienz einer Company Town aus systemischer Perspektive – Wolfsburg im bisherigen Verlauf des 21. Jahrhunderts
摘要
In the broadest sense, a company town is a city whose raison d’être depends on a single company. Hardly any other city in Germany is as characterized by a company as Wolfsburg is by Volkswagen. As a result, Wolfsburg appears to be vulnerable to economic shocks. One concept that examines the ability of a system to react to a shock is that of regional economic resilience. The aim of this study is to analyze the resilience of the company town of Wolfsburg over the course of the twenty-first century to date using a system approach. This approach looks at the structural and functional change of a system in the course of a shock, draws conclusions about the respective resilience from the extent of the change, and is supplemented in this work by a performance approach. Not only shocks such as the financial crisis, the VW emissions scandal and the COVID-19 pandemic are included in this, but slow-burn processes such as climate change and globalization are also considered. The latter are putting pressure on the automotive industry to adapt and are also bringing about structural and functional change in Wolfsburg, from which conclusions can once again be drawn about the resilience of the company town. As a result, it has been shown that Wolfsburg has demonstrated a so-called engineering resilience to short-term shocks and a so-called evolutionary resilience to turbulence that were based on a slow-burn process. Against the background of the current sales crisis at VW, the study concludes that the same close cooperation between VW and Wolfsburg is required as was the case at the end of the 1990s, when they successfully responded to the changes in the automotive industry caused by globalization.