Abstract
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).