Petty Capitalists and Globalization: Flexibility, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development

4. Flexibility for Whom?: Small-Scale Garment Manufacturing in Rural Mexico

4 Flexibility for Whom?: Small-Scale Garment Manufacturing in Rural Mexico Frances Abrahamer Rothstein This chapter, based on twenty-five years of anthropological fieldwork in San Cosme Mazatecochco, a rural community in central Mexico, describes the recent emergence of “flexible production” in San Cosme and analyzes how and for whom flexible production is flexible. After a discussion of the broader national and international context of garment production, the first part of the chapter focuses on the nature of flexible production in San Cosme. The second part of the chapter describes who in the community has been able to set up garment workshops; who works in the workshops ; who controls workshop production; and why some workshops , owners, and/or merchants have been more successful. The concluding section relates local success and flexibility to regional, national, and international policies and suggests that flexible production has varied consequences at different levels of production. What is flexibility at the global level for large companies may be constraint at the local level for communities, workshops, or individuals . Furthermore, flexibility is by definition unstable; consequently what is flexible in one phase may be restriction at another stage. Finally, the analysis of San Cosme suggests that flexibility is just one aspect of a new relationship between the residents of this community and global capitalism. In this new relationship, flexibility and control at the local level are largely illusions that hide a reality of greater control by fewer people at the global level. 67 Flexible Production The concept of flexibility has been used increasingly to discuss accumulation (Harvey 1989), labor, and technology (Carlsson 1996; Vangstrup 1997) production (Taplin 1996), and specialization (Piore and Sabel 1984). Although there are important differences , most analysts focus on the idea that commitment to products and/or workers is flexible. As Arthur Stinchcombe suggests , the critical criteria is “short production runs of many different products . . . produced nearly as cheaply as long runs of standardized goods”1 (1987:186). The cheapness of flexible production has led many observers to suggest that flexible production is necessarily associated with “sweating,” and exploited labor (see, e.g., N. Green 1997; Simmons and Kalantaridis 1994, 1996). Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, who have one of the most optimistic views of flexible specialization, argue that sweating is not inherent in flexible specialization. For them, competition, and thus exploitation, can be controlled by the “creation, through politics, of an industrial community that restricts the forms of competition to those favoring innovation” (1984:17). This optimistic view is not shared by all; others, especially those who see flexible production or specialization as growing with globalization and inequality are less sanguine (see, e.g., Taplin 1996). Some of the disagreement comes from the fact that, as Nancy Green2 points out, flexibility can exist at two levels: “the global level of an economic sector and the firm level of work organization” (1997:6). Most analyses of flexibility, she suggests, have stressed the global rather than the firm level. But, she argues, the two levels cannot be separated and we must ask, flexibility for whom? In this chapter I suggest that flexible production has enormous advantages for retailers, manufacturers, and retailer/manufacturers who face intense competition for consumers. For workers, owners, and worker-owners of the small flexible firms, however, the possibilities for gain are more illusory than real. At the global level, the ceaseless change that characterizes the contemporary flexible production of garments is an important part of what Gereffi calls “buyer-driven” commodity chains in which large retailers, designers, and trading companies drive decentralized production networks (1994). Especially in the fashion-driven apparel industry, buyer-driven commodity chains are increasingly specifying what is produced, when, and at what price. Along with modern means of transportation and communication and the low3 skill and capital requirements of garment production, the expanded 68 Frances Abrahamer Rothstein power of buyers (whether retailers or manufacturers or, as is increasingly the case, retailer/manufacturers) constantly shifts garment production to new, more remote areas.4 Furthermore, in the effort to constantly have new products, production has become more “flexible” (Gereffi and Hemple 1996). Rather than maintaining large inventories, retailers or manufacturers increasingly contract out apparel production. That is, they hire contractors as they need them and the contractors arrange for production of short runs. This, as Gary Gereffi (1994) among others notes, allows buyers to respond more rapidly to changing market patterns. Until recently, such decentralized production...