Flexibility in Production through Subcontracting: The Case of the Poultry Meat Industry in Greece

The author focuses on the issue of flexibility in production using a particular historical example: that of the poultry meat industry in Greece. The case study material is presented as an example of the advantages of theoretically informed empirical research and realist methodology for studying uneven capitalist development and the enormous range of contrasting configurations of capitalist production and its spatial distribution. The poultry meat industry in Greece, although showing the characteristics of an extreme flexibility in production (which is primarily the result of an extensive subcontracting system), shows developments that cannot be interpreted within the theoretical framework of the school of flexible specialization. This allows the author to suggest that the eagerness of flexible specialization theorists (Piore and Sabel, Freeman and Perez, et al) to prescribe new technoeconomic futures hinders their appreciation of sociospatial complexity in capitalist development and encourages them to persist with models of industrial transformation of limited relevance. The points that are raised must also be seen as a reply to those in Greece—researchers and politicians—who argue in favour of a flexible specialization strategy as a means of modernizing the structure of Greek industry.