| Under what conditions is the core work force's active commitment to laboring productively under flexible work arrangements sought, secured, and reproduced over time by employers? How are goals of competitiveness and agility in the face of volatile markets squared with concerns about equity and participation for the work force? These key questions are increasingly salient in political, societal, and policy terms in countries throughout the contemporary world system, as economic activity becomes more globally organized and oriented. This study examines the relationship between the globalization of production and concomitant spread of “flexible” forms of employment, production, and work organization, on the one hand, and continuities and change in relations of work and employment involving workers, unions, managers, and states, on the other. Empirically, it centers on the rapidly transforming international automobile assembly industry during the 1980s and 1990s, examining both established (“brownfield”) and new (“greenfield”) production sites in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States as they moved from mass-production to more flexible production and work arrangements. The study finds considerable but patterned variation in the emergent social relations of flexibility across individual automobile plants, a variation which is captured by the proposed ideal types of “collectively embedded flexibility” (negotiated, consensus-driven restructuring) and “individually embedded flexibility” (unilateral, management-imposed restructuring). In explaining why one or the other dominant pattern emerges, and why intra-national differences across plants are often as salient as cross-national differences among the three countries, the study criticizes the limitations of both “national system” and firm-centered explanatory frameworks. Instead, it demonstrates the explanatory power of a social network-based framework that highlights contingent forms of structured interaction among managers, workers, unionists, and other key actors and allies, forms shaped by the particular relational history and fabrics surrounding individual factories. |
