ABSTRACT
Recent years have witnessed a lively debate over economic restructuring processes and the changing geography of production. While much attention has focused on the proclaimed resurgence of regional economies (for a review, see Storper, 1995b), there has also been analysis of the continued salience of internationalization, and of the significance of connections between global and local processes (Amin and Thrift, 1994). For some writers there have been epoch-making changes in the organization of production, constituting a decisive break with past practices (e.g. Scott, 1988b); others, less programmatically, stress complexity and indeterminacy (e.g. Amin and Malmberg, 1992; Hudson, 1989a). The concept of the production system has also been elaborated, as a shorthand notion encompassing recognition of the complex interaction between processes of transformation, distribution, circulation and regulation. In Europe, such debates have been given heightened relevance by two further developments: moves towards a single internal market within the enlarged European Union, and the dramatic political-economic reforms set in motion in Eastern Europe after 1989. Both these developments fundamentally altered the terrain on and through which production systems are constructed, but altered it in as yet uncharted ways; indeed, it is likely that their full implications will only become evident over the next ten to twenty years.
