The Regional Responses by Mittelstand Firms: Falling Back on ‘Tried and Tested Relations’, Transmission of Pressure and Systemic Change

This final empirical chapter analyzes regionally focused responses to wider political–economic pressures from Mittelstand firms. Grounding analysis on selected case studies, I argue in the first section that sample firms revert to traditional and institutionally close ties at times of environmental turbulence, regional inter-firm relations partially assuming a different quality. Following the chain of events down the production system, Sections 7.2 and 7.3 investigate evidence for a transmission of pressure externally to other firms and internally to labour. Finally, after having reached the ‘lowest’ scale of investigation with the individual business firm, Section 7.4 returns to higher-scale levels, linking firm-level findings to trends in the regional labour market(s) and to the changing spatial division of labour between the Ruhr and East Germany and Eastern Europe, respectively. The main finding concerns the fact that although falling back on ‘tried and tested’ relations and building social capital, forces of competition and ‘economic imperatives’ are always present, leading to a conflictual juxtaposition of competitive and cooperative impulses in inter-firm and capital–labour relations.