Flexible production systems: analytical tasks and theoretical horizons – a reply to Lovering.

The article presents author's reply to sociologist John Lovering comments on the paper on flexible production organization and regional development. Lovering does not dispute the internal logic of the analysis of the relationship between market uncertainty and vertical disintegration. He merely asserts that firms are complex phenomena and might respond in ways different from those that author proposed depending on context and that the author's analysis is of necessity closed to these alternative possibilities. The claim that wider social and political influences are banished from author's analysis by ceteris paribus assumptions is incorrect. Lovering criticizes the work for its presumed insensitivity to the contingencies of real empirical outcomes.