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This paper contributes to the theoretical debates which seek to explain economic restructuring and social recomposition in rural areas. There has been a recent movement towards applying a supposed transition from Fordism to post-Fordism to rural change, but the paper urges caution in this respect, arguing that the regulationist literature requires sensitive handling if it is to fulfil its potential as a framework for conceptualizing rural change. Emphasis is therefore given to the intermediate concepts of 'mode of regulation' and 'societalization' as starting points for understanding contemporary rural life, and these concepts are grounded spatially with reference to Harvey's notion of structured coherence. Discussion of these concepts is then linked to a series of illustrations of the changing structured coherences discernible in rural Britain. In particular the paper emphasizes the breakdown of previously localized coherence and the replacement by more fragmented coherence reflecting different forms of commodification occurring in rural areas. The use of this conceptual framework has important implications for continuing research in rural studies.

It is now widely accepted that gender relations take a spatially specific form. Distinctive national, regional and local patterns in the ways in which men and women divide paid labour and caring work result in an uneven geography of the total work of social reproduction and, it has been argued, distinctive regional or local gender cultures. It is also clear that the overall gender order and its geography undergo periodic change. Currently in Britain, and in many other industrial nations, the old gender order of industrial Fordism is collapsing and the traditional moral certainties of that period, perhaps most dominant in Britain in the 1950s, are being renegotiated. In the 1950s, women were expected to seek personal development by the direct care of others, whereas men fulfilled their moral obligations towards others by sharing the rewards of their independent work achievements. However, even during the 1950s, there was considerable diversity in the ways in which women and men undertook the social obligations of care and the division of responsibility for the total burden of social reproduction, especially among households in which women's labour market participation was significant. In this paper, drawing on oral histories undertaken with migrant women who came to Britain in the late 1940s from Latvia, I examine the gendered divisions of labour they established in the 1950s and critically assess the significance of spatially differentiated gender cultures for this group.

Recently some economic geographers have drawn our attention to what are alleged to be fundamental changes in production, based on the adoption of more flexible machines and labour within firms, and more flexible relations between firms. Certain spatial implications such as reagglomeration of production are said to have resulted from these changes, or are believed to be underway. This paper critically examines these contentions by setting out the fundamental elements of these changes, considering the degree of their pervasiveness throughout western economies, and the extent to which such changes really do represent a distinct break with the past history and geography of production. In doing so, this paper seeks to uncover the true motivations underlying technological change in the workplace, exposing some common misconceptions about the new flexible production methods and their impacts.

The burgeoning crisis of capitalist production from the middle of the 1970s helped stimulate a debate as to the existence and character of an emergent crisis of Fordism, both in the broader sense of a Fordism as a macro-scale model of development and in the narrower sense of a particular form of organization of industrial production. One part of this debate came to focus upon alternative methods of organizing production as companies experimented with new strategies and geographies of mass production. Of particular significance was the challenge posed to European and North American producers by the growing importance of Japanese companies and associated 'just-in-time' and lean production methods. This paper examines the resultant restructuring of automobile production, paying particular attention to the regulatory regimes within which production takes place; the social relations of production, both between capital and labour and between capitals; technologies of production; geographies of production; and the local and regional development implications of these changes.