ABSTRACT
While a great deal of attention has been directed in recent years to the forms of economic restructuring, much less has been devoted to its processes, especially to the ways these reflect the struggles between social classes and the changing regulatory constraints of the state. Mainstream ‘flexible specialisa-tion/flexible accumulation’ scholars, in fact, underplay the involvement of social conflict in restructuring (e.g. Piore and Sabel 1984, Harvey 1989). In portraying restructuring as the necessary response of firms to an increasingly volatile and competitive global market, they imply that restructuring is inevitable and value-neutral, thereby masking its intentionality and distributional impacts. They offer us little insight into the sources and extent of industrial and local variation. Nor are we given purchase on the ways that class concerns and strategies figure in economic restructuring: how it might affect the power relations between social classes, and what initiatives class actors might take to challenge, encourage, or even effect it. Of particular and unexplored interest are the ways that new economic forms engender fundamental contests over culturally-constructed meanings and entitlements, contests that may vary decidedly across local production environments and crucially engage the apparatuses of the state.
