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This article uses historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to ask how policymakers interpret historical, political, and economic factors to construct inter‐ethnic communities that would bring security and economic growth to an enlarged European Union (EU). Focusing on post‐Soviet Estonia's ethnic integration policy, the article argues that ‘flexibility’ applies not only to post‐Fordist, individualized subjects, but also to relations between subjects of different nationalities that policymakers want to form organically in service sector employment. The article explains how this policy construction emerged in light of Estonia's historical trajectory from 1991 to 2001 and demonstrates how it conceptually resolved the fundamental tension between the territorialized nation‐state and deterritorialized global capitalism. A visual media campaign entitled ‘Many Nice People: Integrating Estonia’ captured the essence of this construction, which obscured how the Estonian nation‐state marginalized minorities whi...

This paper investigates urban policy-making and development from a regulation theory perspective. It describes major Toronto urban trends of the past 50 years in order to gauge their conformity to changing regulation conditions. Results indicate that in the 1950s and 1960s, policies in Toronto were in accord with the Fordist mass consumption and welfare orientation. They also suggest a coincidence between the post-1995 period of public-sector retrenchment and the market-driven nature of post-Fordism. The intermediary period, however, was dominated by unsuccessful efforts at maintaining Fordist-type policies in a regulation context shifting towards post-Fordism. These findings confirm the non-functionalist interpretation of links between policy-making and regulation professed by regulation theory researchers. They also cast light on the role the city plays in the changing nature of regulation. Assertive metropolitan planning and socially balanced sub-divisions characteristic of the Fordist period of regula...

Post‐Fordism and globalisation are interrelated contemporary features of social and economic development. Open and distance education are reflexively engaged with post‐Fordism and globalisation and this raises issues for policymakers and practitioners in open and distance education alike. Drawing on recent work by the author (Evans 1995a, 1995b) this article discusses some individual, social and educational issues concerned with globalisation, especially in relation to the emerging post‐Fordist forms and practices of open and distance education, and to the cross‐cultural contexts involved.

Debate concerning industrial restructuring in Australia has mainly focused upon the attributes of post‐Fordist as opposed to Fordist forms of work organisation. However, the Industrial trades, which are also undergoing restructuring, have not been adequately considered in this debate. This paper argues that an important characteristic of the industrial trades, both in terms of economic efficiency and the nonalienating character of the work, has been the integrity of the work culture. It further argues that, while this form of work organisation already provides a viable alternative to Fordism, it will be diminished by restructuring based upon post‐Fordist criterion. The paper concludes that underlying the debate about the qualities of post‐Fordism is a postmodern ideology of autonomy which encourages the disintegration of conventional forms of association and communication and, thus, is oblivious to the merits of the tradesperson cultural identity.

This article contributes to the current controversy concerning the application of the Fordist framework to distance education and open learning by showing that bureaucratic practice can best be understood from within the Fordist framework. In addition, it draws attention to the distinction between bureaucratic and post‐bureaucratic practices, These issues are of particular significance to distance education institutions for frequently their success has been measured by the size of their student populations, and large student populations increase the prospects of bureaucratic practices being the norm.

Gender relations in employment are one of the fastest changing areas of social relations in both the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, and face even greater changes as there is closer integration in the EC and as the organization of employment relations is restructured. Three related is sues are addressed here. First, there is an apparent paradox: While there has been an enormous increase in the extent of women's paid employ ment in the United Kingdom and much of the rest of the EC, there has only been a very slight closing of the equity gap between men and women in employment in these countries. Second, what is and will be the impact of increasing European integration, especially within the EC, on the position of women in employment? Third, are the political pres sures represented in the Social Charter and Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome for equal opportunities likely to achieve their aims since they are predicated on a Fordist employment structure, just as the EC moves in a post-Fordist direction? The main focus here is on the United Kingdom as a member state of the EC, with some reference to other EC and other European countries. The article is divided into two sections: the first deals with the substantive points of change; the second focuses on the theoretical issues involved.

In the context of precarious post-Fordist urban labour markets, Dress for Success in the Netherlands, a non-profit working in the context of the welfare state, provides dress advice to a majority of men. Dress advice consists of moments in which demands for immaterial labour find material translations into items of clothing. Building on ethnographic observations, I argue that dress advice-encounters should be seen as exercises in adaptability to new and ever changing economic circumstances. In these pedagogies, gender is a key instrument. Rather than a straightforward feminization of the economy, what is at stake is a performance of openness towards becoming adaptable to future labour market demands. Asking men to depart their attachments to Fordist working class masculinities and its material translations is an exercise toward becoming pliable enough for post-Fordist precarious labour markets.

This paper examines new cultural and political movements that have developed outside of traditional leftist politics since the early 1990s in Japan. The new movements, including Dame‐ren, the Cardboard House Art movements in Shinjuku and recent anti‐war protests on the Iraqi war, were mainly led by young people, in particular, the freeter generation, who did not experience the leftist politics of the 1960s. These movements are different from traditional Marxist political ones and even from the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that they incorporate more cultural practices such as art, music, dance and performance into their political activities. The paper also explores the historical background against which the new movements were born and have developed since the end of the Bubble economy. It sees freeters, young part‐time workers, as emerging, new political actors that have appeared through the transition of a mode of production from Fordism to post‐Fordism. The transformation of ...

This essay assesses the feminist potential of workplace flexibility when it emerged as an object of knowledge in 1980s US public culture. The keyword flexibility, which crossed economic discourses about topics ranging from production to remuneration to consumption, was constructed as coextensive with feminism at this time. The essay begins by analyzing popular knowledge concerning labor flexibility created in scholarship and mainstream news. Next, the paper focuses on the contemporaneous articulation of flexibility to feminism. Since 1980, news, scholarship, and film argued that flexibility might provide a feminist antidote for late twentieth-century capitalism's harsh draining of labor from bodies. Particularly, flexible working conditions became publicized as a way that mothers could be better accommodated in the workplace. Yet as the century waned, flexibility failed to uproot standard time-intensive models of work and excluded some women from job opportunities and job security. When flexibility appear...

This article reconsiders the question of nostalgic consumption in East Germany as embedded not within a national or a regional (post-socialist) politics of time, as much literature has done, but rather within a global post-Fordist reconfiguration of the relation between time, consumption, and politics. Examining an underclass East Berlin neighborhood that has come to epitomize ‘pastness’, I show the salience of material prosperity – or its lack – in shaping the senses of time of its inhabitants. Especially for the younger generation, nostalgic commodities mediate the growing abyss between loss and accumulation, futures and pasts, nostalgic longings and unrealistic aspirations. I argue that the nexus of time, politics, and consumption has been transformed with the fading away of what has been called the future perfect (the political temporality of utopian projects) and its metamorphosis into what I term here the past conditional, the temporality of lost futures, irredeemable opportunities, and vanquished p...

The commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge and increased public participation in democratic decision-making about science and technology have emerged as the two central themes of contemporary science policy in Britain. We argue that the prominence of participatory discourse in contemporary science policy is primarily due to the close fit of this discourse with the post-Fordist and post-industrial economic strategy of the British state. Participation is a form of immaterial labour which gains currency in this phase of capitalism, blurring the distinctions between production and consumption, and between the economy and the political or communicative public sphere. Participation is cognitive, interpretative, affective, and social work which enters into the construction of technologies as bundled material artefacts and cultural meanings. Participation operates both in the production and consumption of goods and in the legitimation of social and political relations. Public engagement exercises prepare...

This article discusses some recent attempts to develop an economic case that can justify proposals for curricular and institutional reform in education of a radical kind. It investigates the claim, which underpins current debates around a Labour Party alternative to Conservative education policy, that a new phase of development, often referred to as ‘post‐Fordism’, of the dominant economies of the western world provides the basis, and the necessity, for a new system of education which would realise a programme of egalitarian and democratic reform.

This article was first presented as the RIPE annual lecture at Durham University on 7 November 1995. It seeks to explore the transformation of the capital-labour relation in the aftermath of the postwar crisis of Fordism. It examines how various solutions to this crisis, in the developed world, the newly industrialized world and, latterly, the former socialist bloc, have brought about a radical restructuring of the world's economic hierarchy. One consequence has been the emergence of continental blocs characterized by the heterogeneity of the economic systems within their sphere. The coexistence of countries with differing labour regimes within integrated continental blocs is the primary focus, with each bloc analysed in turn for its particular aspects. This leads to consideration of the possibility of a third international division of labour. The article concludes with an examination of an unexpected consequence of this restructuring, namely the relation between systems of labour-capital relations and at...

In recent years a substantial body of literature has grown up around the application of the theorectical insights of regulation theory to the evolution of patterns of local governance and the structures of the local state (Geddes 1988: Goodwin, Duncan and Halford 1993; Painter 1991: Peck and Tickell 1992: Stocker 1989 inter alia). These new patterns of local governance are characteristically seen to be associated with the replacement of the formallly accountable, democracitcally elected structures of local government with a plethora of unaccountable and non-elected agencies involving public-private sector ‘part-nership’, Within this literature the emergence of new patterns of local governance is accounted for in terms of a response to the crisis of Fordism. In this article it is argued that regulation theory's principal analytical strength lies in its analysis of the internal contradictions and dynamics of modes of regulation, but that it has thus far failed to develop an adequate explanation of the trans...

Precarity as a concept has come to be conceived as a distinctive experience of neoliberal development, especially in the European context. The experience of precarity, according to some, has influenced efforts aimed at living otherwise from the precepts of neoliberal development. Yet, for others, precarity is producing a ‘new dangerous class’. However, despite different perspectives of the effects and implications of precarity, the analytical purchase and political utility of the concept has received insufficient attention. In this article, we hope to contribute to critical debates on the limitations of ‘precarity’ as a concept for critical political analysis. We argue that in the dominant use of precarity as an analytic of inequality, particular experiences are rendered as historical universals. Consequently, these (particular) experiences are disconnected from global social and political relations of inequality, while at the same time reinforcing a linear and reductionist conception of development. We demonstrate that the temporal scheme represented by the notion of the ‘age of post-Fordism’, which serves as a crucial marker of the explanatory framework of precarity (in Europe), actually misconstrues the politics of global development through inequalities. Moreover, the tendency to focus on subjectification as conditioning the formation of a ‘new’ dangerous class, entails far-reaching omissions of actual transnational political struggles against domination and inequality. Instead of precarity, a critical engagement with the politics of global development ought to be the subject of analysis for understanding contested relations of affluence, insecurity and inequality.

The Global Justice Movements emerged in the context of the contradictions and crisis of neoliberal–imperial globalization and the critique of it. They therefore express and provide a basis for the politicization of the negative consequences of post-Fordism and its crisis. This article examines the structural changes of the last 30 years from a Gramscian perspective of neoliberal globalization as a “passive revolution” and as the deepening of a “imperial mode of living” at a global scale. It is argued that examining structural changes helps us to understand why protest and social movements re-emerged around the year 2000. The article discusses some central features of the Global Justice Movements by focusing on the international Attac movement and the recent Occupy movement.

Over two decades ago, the term “restructuring” became a popular label for describing the tumultuous political‐economic and spatial transformations that were unfolding across the global urban system. As Edward Soja (1987: 178; italics in original) indicated in a classic formulation: Restructuring is meant to convey a break in secular trends and a shift towards a significantly different order and configuration of social, economic and political life. It thus evokes a sequence of breaking down and building up again, deconstruction and attempted reconstitution, arising from certain incapacities or weaknesses in the established order which preclude conventional adaptations and demand significant structural change instead […] Restructuring implies flux and transition, offensive and defensive postures, a complex mix of continuity and change. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars mobilized a variety of categories—including, among others, deindustrialization, reindustrialization, post‐Fordism, internationalization...

This article situates the dominant discourses of “global citizenship” employed in North American universities to internationalize the curricula, drawing in part on evidence from one Pacific northwestern Canadian university in the post-September-11 context of recent restrictive immigration policies, anti-terrorist measures and evocative Cold War memories. Far from weakening the Canadian nation-state or jettisoning neoliberalism, it argues that authoritarian post-Fordism constitutes a supra-juridical state that offers fewer social services but governs with more entrepreneurship through its globalization, immigration and “national security” policies. The article shows how the post-September-11 changes to Canada's immigration and refugee legislation from 1978 to 2001, write evocative fears about “terrorists” and “invading immigrants” on the national body politic. These changes provide literal and metaphorical transnational, economic and socio-legal mobility with substantive and specific human rights to those ...

Following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the concept of sustainability in general and of urban sustainability in particular has become increasingly significant in the course of the 1990s. Even if the environmental problems of cities are far from being solved, one can interpret this development as a change in the relationship between society and nature on both a discursive and a material level. At the same time the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has given rise to new forms of urban entrepreneurialism, with an absolute priority to economic competitiveness on the one hand and sharpened social conflicts on the other. Looking at the case of the Hamburg region, the article discusses the interaction of these processes. Contrary to the understanding of sustainability as a broadly accepted policy goal it conceptualizes sustainability as a terrain of conflict. As such, we will argue, the sustainability concept and the underlying change in social relations with nature contribu...

International examinations are increasingly being used by local elites to reproduce their advantage in the face of growing educational competition and the changing economic order associated with globalisation and 'post-Fordism'. Evidence from opportunity samples of students taking these examinations in five countries suggests how this may be working in practice. The evidence indicates that the patterns of use are various and are influenced both by local educational cultures and by broader considerations of location in relation to global economic 'cores'. International credentials bring a qualitatively new dimension to the issue of credentialism and credential inflation as they exclude the majority from participation in the new competition for access to the most advantageous occupational opportunities.

This paper focuses on the increasing collaboration between industry and higher education, and argues for the need to acknowledge the different values of each. We start by examining the nature of values, making use of Isaiah Berlin's contention that ultimate values often come into conflict with one another because they are incommensurable. We argue that capitalist values within industry still prevail, despite the impact of environmentalism and post-Fordism. Within higher education traditional academic values, we contend, retain their dominance, despite the shift to a mass system and the cultural impact of postmodernism. These profound differences are manifested in collaborative courses and sponsored research. We conclude by considering the different purposes of higher education and industry, and argue that such differences should be acknowledged and respected in order to avoid destructive conflict where the interests of industry and universities meet.

This paper discusses attempts to rethink socialism in the light of recent economic, social and political developments such as the rise of neo-liberalism, post-fordism, the demise of state socialism and globalization. It posits four new revisionist models of socialism - individualist socialism, market socialism, citizenship (or radical democratic) socialism and associational socialism. It examines each critically, arguing against the first and second models and in favour of the third and fourth. Associationalism, it is argued, provides a means for achieving the goals of citizenship or radical democratic socialism - a participatory pluralist and communitarian socialism. Associationalism, based on a strong role for associations in civil society and a co-operative polity, is outlined and advocated.

The importance of education and training policy is being enhanced by its increasingly high profile as a competitive strategy in the age of global capitalism. This article argues that human–capital theory, because it objectifies skill and fails to uncover its social context, offers an inadequate framework for understanding the relationship between the economy and skill systems. An adequate economic framework for understanding changes in education and training systems must be linked to a theory of institutional change in the economy. The article used one such theory, in building on the contributions of the regulation school but concludes that, contra the ideology of post–Fordism and of liberal political economists, a high–wage/high–skills strategy is only one route for capital accumulation in the 1990s, and that this route will only be achieved through conflict. The article concludes that, this used alongside other policies, a progressive education strategy which could be linked with the usage of high skill...