This book attempts to unify the economic analysis of the production process in order to understand the effects of technical change. It is both an analytical representation of the production process, taking into account the temporal, organizational, and qualitative dimensions of production, and a fact-finding model for studying the economic effects of technical change. The inclusion of temporal and organizational aspects allows the author to examine the analytical implications of recent research on the nature of firms and the characteristics of technical change, while the model is used to analyze technical changes that involve variations of scale or degrees of flexibility. This book deals with themes much discussed in recent research in industrial economics and management studies, and is an important contribution to bringing these two areas of research closer together, providing a general framework for the study of production processes.