Flexible specialization versus post-Fordism: theory,evidence and policy implications

There is widespread agreement that something dramatic has been happening to the international economy over the past two decades: rapid and radical changes in production technology and industrial organization, a major restructuring of world markets, and consequent large-scale changes in the policies of economic management at the internahonal, national and regional levels. At the same time there is a great deal of confusion about how to characterize these changes, the mechanisms at work, and the policy implications for different groups of economic and political actors. One way of accomplishing these tasks is to postulate a change of basic manufacturing organization from a ‘Fordist’ pattern that prevailed in the years of the long post-1945 boom to a ‘post-Fordist’ successor in the later 1970s and 1980s. Many people habitually conflate three approaches to industrial change under this heading: flexible specialization, regulation theory, and a more diverse body of explicitly ‘post-Fordiit’ analyses. The resulting problem is that significant differences of approach are concealed bv a suerficial similaritv between the proponents of flezble specialization and a sit of adparently similar bbt underlyingly divergent ideas. The purpose of this paper is to examine systematically the differences between flexible specialization, regulation theory, and other variants of ‘post-Fordism’ with respect to their fundamental assumptions and theoretical architecture, their methodological approach and use of evidence, and their policy implications.