Downsizing Nature: Managing Risk and Knowledge Economies through Production Subcontracting in the Oregon Logging Sector

Abstract

The logging sector in Oregon is characterized by extensive subcontracting between wood-commodity manufacturing firms and independent logging contractors. Why is this so? Considerable recent scholarship has examined the dynamics of flexible production systems, including regional contractor networks, as prominent aspects of late capitalism. Although useful, existing accounts of flexibility are inadequate to explain why logging in particular would be subject to contract production relations. A second literature emphasizes the ‘difference’ of nature-centered sectors, particularly industrial agriculture. I argue that a similar logic applies to logging. That is, natural sources to unpredictable variation and extensive, inconstant geographies restrict the predictability and calculability of production, and the imposition of labor monitoring and discipline. Contracts are a strategy for firms to displace resulting risks and costs onto contractors, while at the same time inducing expert-based rationalization of production. Repeat contracting provides a means of capturing expert knowledge among reliable contractors with knowledge of the parent firm's lands and mills. This is a particularly appealing strategy for vertically and horizontally integrated firms with complex operational portfolios. However, though contracting is one flexibility strategy, Weyerhaeuser's Competitive Logging Program featuring restructured wage relations provides an alternative path to more flexible production, one that further illuminates some of the problems of nature-based production.