The Restructuring of Capital, the Local Political Economy and Household Work Strategies

Abstract

It is now a commonplace to recognise that the national and international restructuring of capital is producing rapid and dramatic changes in urban and regional economies.¹ This has led to yet a further shift in focus amongst those ever in search of a ‘new’ urban sociology.² An earlier debate shifted the focus from the misplaced concreteness of the spatially-defined local area, to what was considered to be the sociologically more significant arena of the politically defined State.³ However, the emphasis on the State as the source of ‘managing everyday life’ through the way it provided the means of collective consumption⁴ was relatively shortlived.⁵ The process of sloughing off public expenditure in Britain and the United States or, in more fashionable terminology, the re-commodification of collective consumption, has re-emphasised market mechanisms and the importance of the individual as opposed to the social wage. At the same time, the growth of trans-national or multinational companies has encouraged a new international division of labour to develop so that local collusion between capital and labour is more likely than conflict.⁶ The threat that a plant might simply leave the country, should the circumstances cease to be entirely agreeable, can have a remarkably de-radicalising influence.