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The literature on industrial districts seems to have reached something of an impasse. On one side the proponents of industrial districts sit around their campfires, supposedly wild-eyed with enthusiasm, talking flexible specialization and postfordism. On the other side are a series of supposedly grim-faced critics, shouting destructive comments about globalization and corporate networks from out of the mist. This paper is an attempt to break out of this often-acrimonious impasse. The author warns to take the emergence of new localized industrial complexes seriously, but wants to set them firmly within a context of expanding global corporate networks. In the first part of the paper, the author summarizes the key arguments of the localization thesis, which predicts a return to industrial districts, and some of the major criticisms that have been made of the claim that there is a resurgence of the regional economy on a pervasive scale. The most powerful case for the possibility of a major return to the regional economy comes from a group of writers speculating on the rise of locally agglomerated production systems out of the crisis of mass production.

This paper argues that the election of Donald Trump is the product of a confluence of historical factors rather than the distinctive appeal of the victor himself. By paying particular attention to the geography of unusual voting behaviour the analytical question comes into view: why did so much uncharacteristic voting occur in the Rust Belt states of the upper Midwest? It is impossible to answer this question adequately using conventional categorical attributes. The usual hypotheses of 'economic anxiety' and white revanchism are unable to account for sudden shifts in the voting behaviour of both white and black voters in post-industrial territories. Instead, it is necessary to turn to the history of the region and the institutional apparatus that connected voters there to the federal government and the Democratic Party. From this perspective we can see that the active dismantling of the Fordist social order set the region on a divergent path from the rest of the country. But this path had no political outlet due to the reorientation of the Democratic Party around a new class and geographic base. Due to this, the party pursued policies that would magnify the region's difficulties rather than alleviate its circumstances. Moreover, the elaborate institutional ties that connected the region's voters to the Democratic Party and the federal government meant that the political implications of regional decline would be muted. However, as these institutions frayed, Rust Belt voters were made available to candidates that challenged the policy consensus that had done so much damage to the region. The election was decided by a Rust Belt revolt that unified black and white working-class voters against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a historical review of forms of temporal structuring and experience in the evolution of work organization. Initially, we review some key images of time and temporality to emerge from philosophy and social theory. In particular, we discuss images of temporal structuring reflected in the two key time metaphors, the line and the cycle. Secondly, we examine some of the main images of time to emerge from the history of work organization. While initially the focus is upon those linear time images that stem from the progressive commodification of the labour process, subsequently this analysis is qualified by time images that reflect the social construction of organizational culture. An examination of the homogeneous time-reckoning systems of Taylorism is complemented by examples of heterogeneous time-reckoning from anthropological and ethnographic studies. Finally, we discuss the postmodernist debate in the sociology of time. Much of the foregoing analysis having been devoted to issues of clock-time, this section sees discussion of what has been referred to as "instantaneous-time", whereby organizational practices are based on time-frames that lie beyond conscious human experience. This concept is associated with the complex shifts from Fordism to the flexible accumulation of "post-Fordism". Central to this debate is the notion of the time-space compression of physical processes and human experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, the reorganization of production and neoliberal 'flexibilization' have made employment increasingly precarious in the developed economies. Examining the concept of precarious employment, the author focuses on two of its dimensions - insecurity and poverty - which he uses to construct a 'precariousness index'. Based on Eurostat data for 1995-2015, he then tracks the growth of precarious employment across the EU-15 and assesses the impact of the 2008 global economic crisis in this respect. While precarious employment generally increased after the crisis, this trend was driven more by poverty in the most deregulated labour markets and more by insecurity in the southern European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has been accompanied by profound changes in the spatiality of west European states. The hierarchical, top-down and redistributive structures that typified the Fordist welfare state have been replaced by more complex spatial configurations as elements of economic and political power have shifted both downwards to subnational territorial levels and upwards to the supranational level. A major debate has developed around the nature of these emerging forms of state spatiality and of the processes underpinning their formation. This paper examines how these processes have operated in the particular case of the Republic of Ireland. Here, the spatiality of the state was founded on a peculiar post-colonial combination of a localised populist politics and a centralised state bureaucracy. While this arrangement was quite suited to the spatial dispersal of industrial branch plants which underpinned regional policy in the 1960s and 1970s, it has become increasingly problematic with the more recent emergence of new trends in the nature and locational preferences of inward investment. This is reflected in the profound conflicts that have attended the formulation and implementation of the National Spatial Strategy, introduced in 2002. The result is a national space economy whose increasing dysfunctionality may now be compromising the very development model upon which Ireland's recent spectacular economic growth has been built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a regulation framework to chart the emergence of neo-Fordism as a flexible accumulation regime and mode of social regulation. Neo-Fordism relies on old Fordist principles as well as incorporating new models of emergent post-Fordisms; old and new social relationships, in their particular combination, specify the trajectory of national variants. I argue that Fordist bargains institutionalized the terms of a compromise between labour, capital and the state. These bargains embedded a male-breadwinner gender contract compromising women’s positions and standardardizing employment contracts around the needs, interests and authority of men. A focus on compromises and contracts makes visible the differentiated gender effects of work transformation in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many now suspect that capitalist industry and society is undergoing major qualitative change, there is little certainty as to its character. Faced with the bewildering variety of changes which are taking place, it is tempting to seize upon simple polemical contrasts, often in the form of binary histories, in order to grasp the whole: industrial versus postindustrial, modernist versus postmodernist, fordist versus postfordist or flexible specialization, or organized versus disorganized capitalism. In the paper the author shall contend that the literature on postfordism is confused in its arguments, long on speculation and hype and based on selected examples whose limited sectoral, spatial and temporal range is rarely acknowledged. Strangely, the postfordist literature has paid little attention to the country, which most threatens western capitalist industry, Japan. Fordism in the strict sense of item is of minor significance in terms of employment. One recent Great Britain estimate puts workers on such lines at only 700 000 of the total Great Britain workforce of 20.4 million.

The immediate post-war period was defined by shifts in capitalism's socioeconomic and institutional underpinnings. Commonly known as Fordism, until the early-1970s models of standardized industrial mass-production and robust state planning and intervention were relatively successful in maintaining secular growth in employment, productivity and demand as well as establishing the national economy and society as unified, governable fields. This paper considers how migration controls in Canada and Australia enhanced and extended such arrangements. In simultaneously boosting production and demand, diversifying and integrating industrial activities and assimilating European migrants into a mass consumer culture while excluding non-Europeans perceived as disruptive of material and sociocultural homogeneity, such policies provided central vectors of economic and cultural nationalism that complemented other monopolistic and redistributive interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the new technological-institutional forms of production in the post imperialist and post Fordist, social institutions of mass production, era. Fordism was based essentially on mass production. By the late 1960s and early 1970s the viability of mass production in particular and Fordism more generally were threatened. The article points out that the technological competence is no longer a question of importing "inappropriate" technologies from the developed countries, but one of making such technologies appropriate by mastering the ability to adapt them more or less continuously on a number of fronts. The development of flexible production represents both a danger and an opportunity for regional policy in industrializing countries. The fundamental contestability of many markets in both price and nonprice terms implies a greater turnover of openings in the markets of the capitalist world as a whole. Flexible production might make it possible to break with patterns of extreme metropolitan primacy.They are typically relatively independent of the particular kinds of agglomeration economies available in old centres of Fordist industry.

The radical processes of social change as a result of the most recent world economic crisis, do not merely alter the face of towns and the scenario of urban conflicts. They have also forced reorientations of theory to be made, which has meant drawing nearer to urban sociology (again) and general social theory, as well as more strongly interlinking their basic approaches to the formation of theories and research. More than ever, urban and regional research has been forced to make certain of its reference framework of social theory and to take as a central theme the relationship between historical changes in the capitalist development of society and the change in spatial structures. Imposing new types of technology and production concepts, with the radical change in the international division of labor which this entails, causes "tertiarization" processes to be accelerated and accentuates the gulf between expanding "global cities" and stagnating old industrial towns. This article sketches a theoretical basic approach for analyzing capitalist development and the historical changes in it which were forced by secular processes of crisis. A few preliminary thoughts lead on from this on the connection between the development of society and spatial structure in the transition from fordism to postfordism. Against this background, the paper investigates the predominant capitalist reorganization concepts with its foreseeable consequences for regional and urban structure. Finally, it outlines a few theses for the future development of regional and urban conflicts.

The article focuses on crisis of urban Fordism is manifested above all through two axes of change and crisis of the state financing of urban housing, facilities and infrastructure and some collective urban services. It mentions collective actions that promoted the production of ‘self-built cities', with their usual cycle of occupation/self-construction/self-urbanisation and finally of consolidation of Informal Settlements (ISs).

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post-slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non-citizen migrants. At the same time, state-enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post-slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post-Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information related to specificities, standards, and customs of 21st century cities. Topics discussed include computational urbanism, globalisation and urbanisation in Asia, and the legacies of bureaucratic routinisation and standardisation by mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor and industrialist Henry Ford.

In recent years, China has emerged as a major source of investment and development assistance across the 'developing world', triggering the rise of global networks that in some ways stand apart from the existing order of globalization. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Cambodia from 2009 to 2011, begins to explore the significance of Chinese investors and managers, a new globe-trotting elite involved in projects around the world. Understanding how this new Chinese mobile class sees its mission is crucial for making sense of how China's 'rise' may be re-scripting globalization and, specifically, how it may be offering new visions of modernity. The author's research suggests that Chinese investors and managers engage in a developmental discourse which is reminiscent partly of colonial days and partly of the heyday of post-war developmentalism. This discourse articulates the possibility and necessity of progress imposed by outside actors, and is accompanied by measures that inculcate a strict Fordist labour discipline. At the same time, the author argues, it may also contain the seeds of a new developmental cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the 'new urban poverty' ( NUP) ( Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long-term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi-scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post-bubble crisis management ballooned in Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule-setting and homelessness, the Japanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, Japan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the experience of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro, this article contributes to the broader debate on development regimes, rescaling and state spatial restructuring in Brazil, and its specificities in relation to the international discussion on the transformations in Atlantic Fordism. I argue that the transition from a (peripheral) development state to a competitive and rescaled regime has been accompanied by important continuities. Legitimized through discourses around development poles and trickle-down effects, the national-developmental regime has systematically promoted some spaces as opposed to others, without much emphasis on the social and environmental dimensions of spatial policies. The emerging competitive state spatial regime, whether in its neoliberalized, or its more recent 'rolled-out' national-developmental version, is merely expected to aggravate the historical socio-environmental contradictions in the production of space. Moreover, scale has proven contested and strategic-relational, both molding and being influenced by actors that seek to use scalar politics to reach their interests. My analysis suggests that, within this scenario, neither economic growth, nor regulatory and institutional strengthening, nor financial resources are likely to produce structural transformation in the inherited spaces of Greater Rio de Janeiro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the central building of the new IG Farben Campus of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University (JWGU), Frankfurt, Germany was occupied by students protesting against the neoliberalisation of higher education. While similar occupations at the old Bockenheim Campus were usually tolerated, if not welcomed, by the university management, this time 176 students and members of staff were forcefully evicted after only 3 days, when the university's presidential board called in the police. To better understand this way of ending such protest, a level of oppression almost unheard of at a German university in the last 20 years, we reconstruct the way in which JWGU, as part of the state apparatus university, has produced the two campuses as particular places that are bound up in and expressions of the national and local condensations of forces of Fordism and neoliberalism respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fordism/postfordism framework has been widely used, but also heavily criticized, in the social sciences. I outline the central points of debate over the use of this framework for analysis of work organization, including the range of models offered as successors to Fordism. I then suggest that, while some criticisms of the concept of postfordism have highlighted important problems and issues, the Fordist/postfordist framework can be elaborated as an analytically coherent, theoretically illuminating approach to the historical, institutional, and comparative analysis of work and employment. Although researchers appear to be using the concept of postfordism increasingly less frequently over the last decade, I argue that it provides a unifying framework within which to analyze work and employment relations in the current phase of capitalism, which is characterized by an apparent variety of new organizational forms within a broader context of increasing disconnectedness of economic institutions. Lean production has become established as the predominant postfordist labor process, widespread in manufacturing but also increasingly being implemented in services. However, this must be distinguished from a broader set of changes in employment relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post-Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously available public emotion. Affective labor is a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies-that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work. Fordism thus appears not as an era past, but as an object of desire and mourning that still retains much social force as people attempt to recapture or at least approximate Fordist forms and feelings of stability and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Geographer is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Talking about stages of capitalism is a difficult business. Over time, however, it is clear that capitalism has existed in somewhat different forms. In its very early stages, European capitalism rose in a world still dominated by feudalism and was mostly confined to a handful of merchants and producers, while the great majority of the population continued to live as, at best, free peasants in a near-feudal economy where money was rare and profit was hardly a concept. The capitalism of the Fordist era was kinder, gentler and more predictable than its Victorian predecessor, and its heyday accompanied and facilitated the establishment of the American system after World War II.

Discusses scholar Nancy Fraser's characterization of writer Michel Foucault as theorist of fordism. View that feudism is a kind of inner reference point of Foucauldian theory; Discussion on Foucault's genealogy; Claims made by Fraser that Foucault is a theorist of fordist discipline, which dominated the so-called "short twentieth century," the time from the First World War to the end of actually existing socialism.

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A growing body of international research points to an association between precarious employment or contingent work arrangements and a higher incidence of injury, disease and psychological distress as well as inferior knowledge/compliance with occupational health and safety (OHS) standards. Despite this, published research on the OHS problems of young workers in hospitality and other service industries largely ignores the fact that many are engaged on a temporary basis. To address this gap we surveyed 304 young temporary workers employed in Australian outlets of a well-known multinational fast food chain. Indices assessed included work-related injuries, exposure to occupational violence, and knowledge of OHS practices and legislative rights. In trying to explain the adverse OHS outcomes associated with contingent work, researchers have repeatedly identified three sets of factors; economic and reward pressures, work disorganisation and regulatory failure. Like most other multinational fast food companies, this firm adopted a Fordist production system. Given suggestions that Fordist systems adversely affect worker health and wellbeing, it seemed plausible that the combination of Fordism with reliance on a young casualised workforce would result in markedly inferior OHS outcomes. Contrary to this expectation, workers surveyed had an incidence of injury around the norm for full-time permanent workers, and an excellent knowledge of risk control measures and OHS legislation. On the other hand, they had limited knowledge of their workers’ compensation entitlements and faced an elevated risk of low-level occupational violence. Far from exacerbating the situation, the primary reason for the positive injury and knowledge outcomes was the Fordist system that tightly specified tasks and incorporated detailed risk assessment and control procedures. This system was shaped by an overriding concern for the company’s bottom line (hence the worker’s poor... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexibility is a prominent catchword in recent economic and political debate. The need for increased flexibility in various areas of society is generally accepted. The article presents and criticizes the terms of this debate. As part of the general neoliberal trend flexibility is often perceived as a purely desirable quality. Less state, less unions and flexibilization by means of greater reliance upon markets are the policies that are proposed to overcome the crisis of the Western industrialized countries. However, flexible adaptation requires a foundation of stable institutions and behaviour patterns. Japan today represents one successful combination of flexibility and stability. Scandinavia — and other small European countries — have been attributed other successful combinations. Here. political stability seems to arise from a big state and an extended corporatist system and, according to Katzenstein, this does not contradict, but rather reinforces. the capacity for economic flexibility. Recent developmental trends, however, challenge this interpretation. The recent structural changes have been considered part of a general transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. The international race to modernize or to implement post-Fordism might imply a new 'match' of techno-economic structures and sociopolitical institutions — also in the Scandinavian countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Urban & Regional Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Discussion concerning the limits and potentials of local labor market policy leads the readers to consider the performance of local-level intervention within the transition from mass production to flexible specialization, or from fordism to post-fordism. Because uniform national systems of income maintenance cannot cover the structural risk of marginalization in the labor market, financial burdens are shifted to the local level: to local authorities, welfare organizations and last but not least to private households. In addition, because marginalized groups of the workforce cannot be reached by uniform national employment policies, labor market policy becomes important, that is, a kind of policy that aims directly at creating and improving the employment opportunities for specific groups of people. In order to reach the target groups it is not sufficient for decisions taken at the central state level to determine access regulations and to make financial resources available. For this reason labor market policy is a local issue per se.

The article outlines a theoretical and empirical investigation of the new industrial spaces (NIS) thesis. NIS thesis is an investigation structured by the principal claim of the thesis to explain the emergent form of uneven development in advanced capitalist societies. The article describes the essential elements of the thesis and, most especially, its spatial logic. That is, its incorporation of transaction costs analysis into location theory to explain how processes of change in the organization of production have brought about a geographical reorganization of production. Subsequently, particular aspects of a theoretical and methodological critique of this logic are analyzed. Following an analysis of the operation of the transaction costs location mechanism in producing the particular outcome of agglomeration, a critique of the empirical methods used in identifying the new industrial spaces will be developed. Finally, both theoretical and empirical investigations are fused to discuss whether or not the new industrial spaces thesis does indeed describe the locational logic of postfordist flexible production.

The article discusses the features of research into local policy in the Federal Republic of Germany during 1980s and 1990s. The article points out that the shift of emphasis in social science research to the local level does not reflect the true significance of self-administration. Local government is classed as the lowest level of central administration, unable in any way to formulate policy aims other than those enshrined within a fundamental consensus on growth policy. The autonomous sphere of influence of the locality is restricted to its ability to mobilize and coordinate the programmes of the central state. Since the mid-1970s, the Fordist model of regulation has been in a structural crisis leading to qualitative restructuring in the deployment of capital and the use of labor resulting in specialization, decentralization and deregulation. The exploitation of local resources and the building up of the endogenous potentialities of a region demand finely tuned, institutionally innovative and comprehensively integrated action from the local state.

The article discusses housing's role in the Fordist organization of the postwar United States political economy. Most U.S. households lived in suburbia rather than in central cities or rural settings and a large majority of families owned their homes. Fordism describes the parallel development of mass production and mass consumption in advanced capitalist countries. Housing's crucial place in the U.S. Fordism was the product of unique historical conditions. Neither mass production nor mass consumption were ubiquitous under the U.S. Fordism, and important segments of the working class were systematically excluded from one or both. Suburbanization not only stimulated demand but was premised on the postwar system of highly segmented class relations. The U.S. Fordism's "suburban solution" was not the only possible solution. Fordism was premised upon an overlapping complex of working-class victories, defeats and accommodations which provided the institutional matrix of the postwar accord. This was both reflected in and reinforced by the post war housing system which delimited the housing opportunities open to various elements of the working class.