Flexible specialization, new technologies and future industrialization in developing countries

Developing countries increasingly recognize that in the future far more attention will need to be paid to firms located outside the modern or formal sector. In this context, the complex of recent microelectronics and organizational innovations seems highly attractive for these are often said to be capable of facilitating a pattern of industrialization based on flexible, small-scale production, rather than on the more typical large-scale technology of mass production. This article, accordingly, seeks to evaluate the various mechanisms through which the new technologies—and the more general possibilities implied by the various definitions of ‘flexible specialization’—may in fact contribute to such an alternative model of industrialization.