Period and Place, Capitalist Development, and the Flexible Specialization Debate

This chapter concerns the way in which we use concepts of period and place in social theory. It is prompted by thoughts raised in the context of the debate about flexible accumulation (FA) and flexible specialization (FS). The idea of industrial divides—whether that first promulgated by Piore and Sabel (1984) between mass production and a more recent revamped craft production or the military-industrial divide of Markusen (1991)—serve to emphasize the issue of periodization in social theory. The attendant concern with industrial districts of the sort first identified by Piore and Sabel brings to mind the issue of just how and why we might divide up substantive domains geographically. Some of the critique of flexible accumulation and flexible specialization theses has also served to draw attention to differentiation in the geographic plane: concerns for the institutional distinctiveness of Japan come to mind here (Kenney and Florida, 1988; Sayer, 1989; Curry, 1993).