"Flexible World" Utopia: The Politics of Flexible Production Modes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22394/2074-0492-2018-4-12-46Keywords:
economic flexibility, flexible specialization, post-fordist debate, post-fordism, political economyAbstract
This article provides a detailed summary and sociological analysis of the theories of flexible production modes, tracing the socio-historical conditions of the production of these theories, the theoretical evolution of the basic concepts and their political content. The author sets out from the assumption that the majority of modern theories in which "flexibility” is used as a key concept derive from flexible specialization theory. The flexible specialization of production as an economic phenomenon and as a scientific paradigm of political economy appeared in the mid-1980s and served as the theoretical basis for market deregulation policy. The author shows that some flexible economic regimes - which are considered in the theory of flexible specialization as pure sources of evidence - in fact evolved under the influence of political will, actions of state protectionism and the process of diversification of big industrial capital. Despite this fact, "methodological purism” continued to dominate in studies of flexible regimes, and the concept of flexible specialization was further developed in economic sociology and organizational theory. With the development of this research domain, it was gradually infected with political implications - it is easy to recognize the traces of a positive political program in Zuboff’s manifesto of post-hierarchical organizations. At the turn of the 1990s-2000s, a number of assumptions of the flexible specialization model have unexpectedly migrated into critical texts saturated with ideas of "exodus”, rejection of "capitalocentrism” and the separation of formal and substantive economic values. The author expresses doubt concerning the adequacy of political judgments linking optimistic expectations with the development and proliferation of flexible forms of economic cooperation. The paper argues that this issue will remain the subject of debates within the left political agenda and social critique for the next 10 to 15 years.Downloads
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