Many roads to flexibility: how large firms built autarchic regional production systems in France

This article discusses the adjustment of large firms in France, in particular how they regionalized their production structures in the 1980s. Throughout the 'Golden Age', large firms had geographically reorganized their activities: strategic planning remained in Paris, while the actual production was decentralized into the provinces, primarily to address cost and labour conflict issues. When the large firms faced a profitability crisis in the 1980s, and the traditional state-financed way out of the problems was no longer available, they saw in these proto-regional production systems a chance to become more competitive. They relied on the decentralization policies of the governments in the 1980s, and used the second-order effects of the new policies as a means to modernize their own operations. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.