ABSTRACT
In the early fifties Philips was the quintessential foreign currency earner for an overpopulated Dutch nation-state deeply dependent on foreign purchases of food and raw materials. Flexible familism, and a whole city geared towards sustaining that relationship, helped to secure the necessary hard currencies. "Worthless histories" were the gendered underside of the valorization of the unprecedented mass of capital sunk into an urban-industrial complex geared to electronics production. This chapter explores concept of flexible familism precisely in order to highlight an ensemble, a key set of interlocking relationships that in characteristic ways shaped not just families and the local industrial relations of the corporation but also the city and the region. This ensemble is called as a "critical junction" in order to emphasize the multi-scalar and intersectional nature of the connective mechanisms and relations. The chapter emphasizes that the actual pressures of global value regimes on concrete labor are often delegated to local actors, relationships and histories.
