ABSTRACT
The Introduction sketches out the main outlines of the book and introduces the major themes, debates, and arguments of the book, chapter by chapter. It sketches out the mutation of contemporary capitalism from its Fordist mode of accumulation and social regulation through to its post-Fordist mode of accumulation and social regulation with its many adjectival definitions of capitalism catalogued here. It also presents a brief outline and history of the main topic of this book, namely, the emergence and development of the flexible specialisation research programme (FSRP) – a retrospective term that is coined here to refer to, moreover, the cluster of perspectives in political economy, sociology, and other social sciences that share something like a family resemblance with each other. The Introduction argues that the FSRP was both a descriptive and explanatory research programme – charting the transformation of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century into its ‘flexible’ and ‘digital’ form – but, at the same time, a very difficult project indeed, a normative and prescriptive research programme, based upon an attempt to sketch out the conditions and strategies necessary for a transformation of capitalism into a more just and egalitarian social ‘form of life’ and ‘mode of production’ which might be something like an ‘experimental’ or ‘knowledge economy’ as Roberto Mangabeira Unger imagines it.
