ABSTRACT
"Entrepreneurship" is a term made famous during the early years of Reaganism, signifying an emphasis on individual economic initiative, the encouragement of "small business" enterprise. The "business community," in publications like the Wall Street Journal, and Business Week, has argued long and hard that a public education system in the United States requires a drastic overhaul if it is to teach the new worker skills necessary in a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive climate of global business. Educational policy is obviously a matter of social, political, and cultural issues no less than economics. The concept of flexible specialization permits a kind of double-exposure image of projected directions of educational reform. It widens the lens significantly beyond the frame of "radical" corporate-culture change that Roosevelt Thomas emphasizes in his managing-diversity programs for reeducating corporate management. Flexible specialization frames a close-up of how the characteristics of educational institutions may vary from one region to another as the forms of specialized manufacture vary.
