Flexible Specialization Research Articles

Golden Opportunities: Jewelry Making in Birmingham between Mass Production and Specialty

Narratives of flexible specialization as an alternative to mass production are largely absent from the industrial history of twentieth-century Britain. In this article, I challenge the notion that we should relegate small firms and industrial districts to a marginal place in the historiography of this period. Drawing from a range of sources, I explore the history of Birmingham's jewelry makers to show how they adapted the traditional productive system of the district to respond in a dynamic way to the challenges of rapid product market differentiation. As jewelry increasingly became a commodity for mass consumption, the firms in the Birmingham district used a combination of specialty and mass production as a strategy to both satisfy and create demand.

Gender, Work and Organization in the Time/Space Economy of ‘Just-in-Time’ Labour

Formidable changes are occurring in the organization of work, production and the labour process. The emerging world of flexibility, part-time contracts and ‘just-in-time labour’ has invoked systemic disruptions in the sequential ordering of time/space. Feminists have been less than sanguine in their resistance to the placeless, timeless logic of ‘just-in-time labour’. The flexible fragmented present of post-fordist production is variously argued to be in contradiction to the embodied social relations through which women ‘weave’ their own autobiographies. While sympathetic to the concept of ‘feminine time’, its application to the present labour market context requires intense inquisition and critical reflection. The modern episteme consisted of a constellation of discourses linked to narrative realism. This is to appreciate that basic to all forms of gendered subjectivity is a conscious subject living in time and capable of uniting the literal with the virtual, or linking one temporal order (the present) with others (the past and future). The ‘timeless times’ and dislocated ‘spatial flows’ of our current era threaten the ability of gendered subjects to form their identities into sustained narratives. Focusing on post-fordist flexible specialization, this article challenges the fixed, unitary, relational subject of feminist critique and begins to deconstruct the problematics of gender and work in the time/space economy of ‘just-in-time’ labour.

A new map of Hollywood: the production and distribution of American motion pictures

Scott A. J. (2002) A new map of Hollywood: the production and distribution of American motion pictures, Reg. Studies 36, 957–975. In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of the economic geography of the so-called new Hollywood. The argument proceeds in six main stages. First, I briefly examine the debate on industrial organization in Hollywood that has gone on in the literature since the mid-1980s, and I conclude that the debate has become unnecessarily polarized. Second, I attempt to show how an approach that invokes both flexible specialization and systems-house forms of production is necessary to any reasonably complete analysis of the organization of production in the new Hollywood. Third, and on this basis, I argue that the Hollywood production system is deeply bifurcated into two segments comprising: (1) the majors and their cohorts of allied firms on the one hand; and (2) the mass of independent production companies on the other. Fourth, I reaffirm the continuing tremendous agglomerative attraction of Hollywood as a locale for motion-picture production, but I also describe in analytical and empirical terms how selected kinds of activities seek out satellite production locations in other parts of the world. Fifth, I show how the majors continue to extend their global reach by means of their ever more aggressive marketing and distribution divisions, and I discuss how this state of affairs depends on and amplifies the competitive advantages of Hollywood. Sixth and finally, I reflect upon some of the challenges that Hollywood must face up to as new cultural-products agglomerations arise all over the globe, offering potential challenges to its hegemony.

Labour Markets, Flexible Specialization and the New Microcorporatism The Case of Canada’s Major Appliance Industry

“High performance” management systems in unionized workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist industrial relations system in Canada. Increasing interfirm and intrafirm competitiveness, combined with restratification of internal and external labour markets, promote a deepening of “core” workforce dependency on employers. Microcorporatist tendencies reflect more active worker cooperation in achieving management productivity, quality and flexibility goals. Analysis of development of these tendencies in the major appliance industry suggests that microcorporatism has contradictory implications. In one direction lies the displacement of both “social movement” unionism and social democratic labour politics by a local-centred unionism that is increasingly captured by the logic of market competition. In a second direction lies a logic of greater worker resistance related to increased worker control of labour processes.

Risk, Activity Modularization, Sourcing, and Economic Geography

Economic geography is fundamentally concerned with describing spatial variation in the economic landscape and explaining the processes through which this geography takes form. Firms are the primary units through which these processes operate. I reinterpret portfolio theory to provide a novel way of explaining and modeling the spatial implications of control structures and organizational decisions within and between firms. In this paper, I argue that each activity of the firm is like an asset with an expected rate of return and a level of risk. Firms implement spatial strategies to manage risk that trade profits for reductions in risk. These strategies encourage geographic switching and perpetuate regional disequilibria in production technology and employment. Risk management and the structure of control in a production chain explain the geographic distribution of economic activity better than do transaction costs, flexible specialization, or agglomeration economies.

Cold War Armory: Military Contracting in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is frequently portrayed as a manifestation of postindustrial entrepreneurship, where ingenious inventor-businessmen and venture capitalists forged a dynamic, high-tech economy unencumbered by government's “heavy hand.” Closer examination reveals that government played a major role in launching and sustaining some of the region's core industries through military contracting. Focusing on leading firms in the microwave electronics, missile, satellite, and semiconductor industries, this article argues that demand for customized military technology encouraged contractors to embark on a course of flexible specialization, batch production, and continuous innovation. Thriving throughout much of the Cold War, major military contractors fell on hard times when defense markets started to shrink in the late 1980s, because specialized design and production capabilities were rarely applicable to civilian product lines. But Pentagon funding for research and development helped lay the technological groundwork for a new generation of startups, contributing to Silicon Valley's economic renaissance in the 1990s.

Cold War Armory: Military Contracting in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is frequently portrayed as a manifestation of postindustrial entrepreneurship, where ingenious inventor-businessmen and venture capitalists forged a dynamic, high-tech economy unencumbered by government's “heavy hand.” Closer examination reveals that government played a major role in launching and sustaining some of the region's core industries through military contracting. Focusing on leading firms in the microwave electronics, missile, satellite, and semiconductor industries, this article argues that demand for customized military technology encouraged contractors to embark on a course of flexible specialization, batch production, and continuous innovation. Thriving throughout much of the Cold War, major military contractors fell on hard times when defense markets started to shrink in the late 1980s, because specialized design and production capabilities were rarely applicable to civilian product lines. But Pentagon funding for research and development helped lay the technological groundwork for a new generation of startups, contributing to Silicon Valley's economic renaissance in the 1990s.

Introduction

Sweatshops are very much in fashion, favored as a strategy of global capitalism and flexible specialization, fought against by union and student activists, and featured in exposes in the daily press and on TV news. Hundreds of thousands of men, and especially women, in dozens of countries across the globe currently work in conditions considered sweated by one of the several definitions that are used by trade unionists, academics, activists, and workers themselves. Hundreds of thousands more will spend at least a part of their working lives in the export processing zones and maquiladores of the Caribbean, Latin America, India, and South East and East Asia. Tens of thousands will migrate to the United States, where sweatshops once again abound in major cities, such as Los Angeles and New York. Far from being an aberration or an archaic holdover from an earlier era of industrialization, the sweatshop has proven to be an integral part of modern capitalism.

Regional Networking of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Japan and Germany: Evidence from a Comparative Study

In this paper we compare the regional network relationships of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the mechanical engineering and related metal manufacturing industries in Japan and Germany. We show that the structure of network relationships is still largely determined by traditional forms of the organization of production, despite convergent developments. The network relationships of SMEs in Japan are thus very largely determined by a hierarchically organized system of production. By contrast, the German SMEs almost always have far more scope for strategic action than their Japanese counterparts because they are less dependent on large companies and have their own distinctive images in the final markets. In both countries, cooperative network relationships are on the increase. However, reregionalization as postulated in the flexible specialization hypothesis does not appear to be a dominant trend in either Japan or Germany.

Embeddedness, knowledge transfer, industry clusters and global competitiveness: a case study of the Indian software industry

This paper develops a dynamic theoretical framework for global competitiveness. The framework is used to assess competitiveness of organizations in the Indian software industry. Behavioural drivers of transaction cost economics like trust and experience influence embeddedness that describes the relationships among organizations in an industry cluster. The spiral for knowledge transfer, culture variables and embeddedness influence knowledge transfer. Embeddedness and knowledge transfer are key determinants of industry clusters that lead to global competitiveness. Industry clusters are characterized by external economies, generalized reciprocity and flexible specialization. Generalized reciprocity describes the relations between constituents of an industry cluster that are based on trust. Flexible specialization facilitates the production of a variety of products for specific markets using general-purpose resources. Global competitiveness is achieved by increased productivity, focussed direction and increased pace of innovation and growth. The implications of the framework for organizations in the Indian software industry are creating trust and encouraging inter-organization relationships. These organizations also need to design processes for tacit knowledge transfer, implement mentoring programs and build general management capabilities.

Management problems in welfare services: the role of the “social entrepreneur” in home-help for the elderly, the Valby case

This article deals with the management problems of the traditional welfare state. The article is based on observations and interviews with employees in the home-help service for the elderly in Valby, a suburb of Copenhagen. On the basis of observations and interviews, and with reference to various relevant studies, the history of home-help in Denmark is examined as a “narrative” in order to uncover critical problems and incidents. In Valby an attempt has been made to promote flexibility and interaction with clients, rather than a standardisation of the services offered. The practical expression of this approach can be seen in the shape of a new entrepreneurial role in management, what I call the social entrepreneur. I discuss briefly how support for this new role can be institutionalised. At the theoretical level, I analyse the Valby case using the theory of flexible specialisation. However, the Valby case illustrates the contextual limitations of this theory and the need to complement the approach with an understanding of management problems at the practical level.

Virtual enterprise networks: the fifth element of corporate governance

Although still flying low under the popular business media's collective radar, virtual enterprise networks (or nets) do receive increased attention in the strategic management literature. A virtual enterprise network (VEN) is a system of autonomous firms that collaborate to achieve common business objectives. VENs give participants a competitive edge in markets demanding agility and rapid response. Seen as an emerging transactional exchange governance (TEG) form within transaction cost economics (TCE), VENs and the relations among firms that form them posit challenges for researchers and managers. VENs differ substantially from markets and hierarchies, and from recurrent and relational contracts, utterly changing what it means to be a firm in today's business. This essay explores alternative TEG forms, their characteristics and the criteria that bear on the choice of corporate governance: flexible specialization, market uncertainty, product (good or service) complexity, reliance on trust, risk, self-organization, shared knowledge, and socio-territorial cohesiveness. The essay offers propositions on the relations among economic criteria and the choice of transactional exchange governance forms by exploring the dynamics of a generic TEG structure. This is a system dynamics simulation model that partially offsets the shortcomings of transaction cost economics (TCE) and points to the potentially rich contribution of system dynamics to exploring VENs beyond the ideal-type TEG forms of markets and hierarchies that dominate the TCE literature.

Flexible Specialization and the Garment Industry

This paper takes issue with accounts that argue that flexible specialization is the appropriate industrial paradigm for the high-end, fashion segment of the apparel industry. Many accounts have argued that apparel factories using mass-production face three obstacles in this segment of the industry: they cannot produce goods quickly enough, they cannot change styles fast enough, and they cannot meet quality standards. Evidence from two case studies and a review of the industry press reveals that large firms in the 1990s have been able to meet these challenges using mass production methods. Quality challenges have been met by the implementation of hyper-Taylorist labor practices such as “statistical process control.”

‘You're Only as Good as Your Last Job’: the Labour Process and Labour Market in the British Film Industry

Recent debates surrounding the future of work and non-standard forms of employment have, especially in the United States, used the film industry as an exemplar and signifier of future industrial change. Much research conducted in the film industry implicitly or explicitly draws on the flexible specialisation framework to understand industrial organisation and labour market operation. It is the contention of this paper, however, that the dual labour market analysis associated with flexible specialisation explanations is too simplistic, failing to reflect the range of factors affecting labour market organisation and operation. The resulting static and atomised analysis is, as such, ill-equipped to conceptualise the complex patterns of organisation and movement evident in the highly uncertain context of film making. Furthermore, the operation and organisation of the labour market cannot be understood independently of the management of labour within the labour process. Production company management set the context and targets of work (in terms of work scheduling, pay, and conditions) and departmental heads retain method autonomy and control the recruitment and performance of ‘their’ group members. However, this is the case within a context in which people need to continually re-secure work and maintain positions within groups and contacts. Therefore, a seeming lack of control over tasks at the point of production is reinforced by the use of labour market mechanisms and influences their form.

`You're only as Good as Your Last Job': The Labour Process and Labour Market in the British Film Industry

Recent debates surrounding the future of work and non-standard forms of employment have, especially in the United States, used the film industry as an exemplar and signifier of future industrial change. Much research conducted in the film industry implicitly or explicitly draws on the flexible specialisation framework to understand industrial organisation and labour market operation. It is the contention of this paper, however, that the dual labour market analysis associated with flexible specialisation explanations is too simplistic, failing to reflect the range of factors affecting labour market organisation and operation. The resulting static and atomised analysis is, as such, ill-equipped to conceptualise the complex patterns of organisation and movement evident in the highly uncertain context of film making. Furthermore, the operation and organisation of the labour market cannot be understood independently of the management of labour within the labour process. Production company management set the context and targets of work (in terms of work scheduling, pay, and conditions) and departmental heads retain method autonomy and control the recruitment and performance of `their' group members. However, this is the case within a context in which people need to continually resecure work and maintain positions within groups and contacts. Therefore, a seeming lack of control over tasks at the point of production is reinforced by the use of labour market mechanisms and influences their form.

Artists as workers: Theoretical and methodological challenges

Artistic labor markets expand along a path of highly unbalanced growth: competitive pressure, flexible specialization of the work organization and pervasive work contingency cross individual as well as entrepreneurial ideals such as self-achievement and innovativeness in ways that challenge conventional views of the skilled working process as well as the conventional survey and measurement methods. High differentiation of artistic products and steady oversupply, which are common traits of an imperfect monopolistic competition, are magnified by work arrangements that evolve towards increasingly fragmented and brokered employment relationship. Work trajectories combine features from professional as well as from entrepreneurial careers, under constraining contingency. Yet, uncertainty of the creative process, that goes along with the ‘functional flexibility’ requirement in the arts, helps to explain artistic behavior: neither a rational actor nor a deterministically driven agent, the artist may be depicted as a bayesian actor learning to balance self-actualization against occupational risk.

Subcontracting in the Privatised Coal Industry

Since the beginning of the 1980s significant academic interest has focused on the process of capitalist restructuring, although opinion is divided as to the nature of this. Some commentators have suggested that Fordism is being displaced as the dominant mode of production (Hirst and Zeitlin 1991) by flexible specialisation, said to be ‘a strategy of permanent innovation’ (Piore and Sabel 1984: 17), which developed in response to increasingly volitile product markets, intense competition, and rapidly changing customer demands. Some critics of this approach have argued that the evidence presented to support the emergence of flexible specialisation is not conclusive (Pollert 1988; Rowley 1994; 1996; Tomaney 1990; Williams et al. 1987), whilst others have observed that flexible specialisation theory, being wholly concerned with product markets and production technologies, overlooks other influences upon corporate practices (Berggren 1992; Vallas and Beck 1996; Schoenberger 1997). It has also been noted that flexible specialisation theorists have over simplified the dynamics of capitalist development (Hyman 1988).

Small Scale Enterprises in Ujung Pandang, Indonesia: Flexible Specialisation at Work?

Using field work material from small scale enterprises in Ujung Pandang, Indonesia, this paper examines the debate concerning whether the flexible specialisation paradigm is applicable to small enterprises in developing country contexts, or whether ‘survivalism’ is a more appropriate description of current production organisation. It is found that whilst there is some evidence for flexible specialisation, this is overshadowed by constraints to flexible specialisation from within and outside the enterprises, and ‘survivalism’ is closer to reality for the enterprises studied.

Strategic and Functional Orientation of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in Professional Services: An Analysis of Public Accountancy

This study examines how SMEs in public accountancy remain competitive, promote and deliver their services. The association among strategic planning, functional diversification (services and markets), methods of promotion and delivery is also examined. These SMEs face considerable difficulty in overcoming both in-house and external barriers in accessing clients requiring non-traditional services (e.g. management consulting), and clients involved in international business (broadly defined). The results show that the proactive, functionally diversified, and/or internationally oriented firms outperform the reactive, functionally concentrated, and local market oriented firms. The competitive advantage for the former categories is based on flexible specialisation such as customisation of services for specific groups of clients, speed of delivery collaboration with other producer service firms, and specialised skills. These firms utilise informal networks to promote their services with minimal investments in sponsorships or media selling. Face-to-face interaction with clients continues to be the preferred mode of service delivery despite the increased adaptation of local area networks and other modes of internationally technology by the proactive, functionally diversified or internationally oriented firms.

Balancing Act: Learning from Organizing Practices in Cultural Industries

The dilemmas experienced by managers in cultural industries are also to be found in a growing number of other industries where knowledge and creativity are key to sustaining competitive advantage. Firms that compete in cultural industries must deal with a combination of ambiguity and dynamism, both of which are intrinsic to goods that serve an aesthetic or expressive rather than a utilitarian purpose. Managers involved with the creation, production, marketing, and distribution of cultural goods must navigate tensions that arise from opposing imperatives that result from these industry characteristics. In this paper we outline five polarities that are shaping organizational practices in cultural industries. First, managers must reconcile expression of artistic values with the economics of mass entertainment. Second, they must seek novelty that differentiates their products without making them fundamentally different in nature from others in the same category. Third, they must analyse and address existing demand while at the same time using their imagination to extend and transform the market. Fourth, they must balance the advantages of vertically integrating diverse activities under one roof against the need to maintain creative vitality through flexible specialization. And finally, they must build creative systems to support and market cultural products but not allow the system to suppress individual inspiration, which is ultimately at the root of creating value in cultural industries.