The Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies

Current debates in social sciences about changes which have taken place in production, particularly within the last decade, abound in the use of categories such as fordism, post-fordism, industrial districts, agglomerations, company networks, etc., which attempt to reflect, analyze and interpret the roots of these changes and their repercussions for work, social classes and society. In many cases these interpretations are theoretically (and politically) oriented, and the debate between different "styles of interpretation" or paradigms is livelier than ever. Moreover, the fields of research and the case studies most commonly mentioned in the literature are frequently subject to contradictory interpretation.

Fundamentally based on original field research, as well as on an extensive review of the existing literature, in this paper we propose the use of approach criteria as a way of deepening our understanding of the social reality surrounding current systems of production: 1) the reconstruction of the global production process; 2) the location of work centers and networks in a territorial context; and 3) the analysis of social and institutional relations, the "industrial atmosphere."