The inability of the industrial restructuring literature to recognize and
address rural industrialization lies partly in its abstraction from the agrarian
origins, contexts, and linkages of industrialization and partly in its
core-centric presumptions. More fundamentally, the dualistic constructions
and “binary histories” (Williams et al., 1987) that underpin both
flexible specialization and regulation theory are deeply problematic. The
unities and oppositions of Fordism and post-Fordism, of mass production
and flexible specialization, are both illusory (Sayer and Walker, 1992:222)
and incapable of dealing with questions of diversity and dynamics.
In recent years, proponents of industrial restructuring have increasingly
taken recourse to structuralist conceptions of networks, embeddedness,
and trust derived from Granovetter’s (1985) remarkably influential
article, together with notions of “path dependency” borrowed from the
new institutional economics.2 Yet this “new institutionalism” is also
severely limited in its capacity to illuminate the questions of sociospatial
change posed by contemporary processes of industrial dispersal. The key
limitation is its abstraction from everyday politics and the exercise of
power, as well as from the history of social property relations.
Part of my purpose is to suggest how elements of the agrarian literature
provide greater analytical leverage than industrial restructuring or the
new institutionalism. There are two related ways in which this literature
speaks not only to rural industrialization, but also to multiple, nonlinear,
and divergent trajectories of capitalist development. First, it is cast in relation
to classical political economy debates that give explicit recognition to
historically specific forms of social property relations and to multiple
paths of agrarian transformation. These in turn bear directly on contemporary
efforts to grasp the multiple reconfigurations of capitalist development
in different regions of the world. Second, scholarship addressed to
the enormous diversity, complexity, and fluidity of social institutions in
“third world” agrarian settings both predates and is more sophisticated
than structuralist concepts in the recent institutionalist literature. Instead
of simply asking what are the rules embodied or embedded in particular
institutional forms, the processual approach taking shape in the agrarian
literature also attends to how negotiation and contestation take place
within and across multiple social arenas. In the discussion that follows, I
develop these arguments and illustrate them with examples from my
recent research on industrial dispersal in South Africa in relation to comparable
processes and regions in Taiwan, China, and Malaysia.