Flexibility and Formalization: Rethinking Space and Governance in Corporations and Manufacturing Regions

This chapter rethinks assumptions about space and governance that have structured debate concerning flexible production within old-line manufacturing industries over the last 20 years in the United States and Europe. Two assumptions, in particular, are reexamined. The first is that industrial communities are located in specific and discreetly bounded territories in which social1 and territorial proximity perfectly overlap.2 The second assumption (often embedded in discourses about trust and informality) is that flexibility and cooperation are possible where formal organizational rules fail to apply, or where they are so general that one must rely on informal cooperation and tacit knowledge in order to get anything done. In much of the literature on cooperation and flexible production systems, producers are simply generalizations of the old sociological notion of a craft producer who turns the limitations of formal rule into a virtue in contexts where production volume is low, the demand for customization high and/or where demand is volatile and frequently changing (Stinchcombe 1959; Sabel 1981; Piore and Sabel 1984).