A New Industrial Paternalism ? Affective Ties in the Social Relations of Production of Regional Economic Networks
The object of this paper is the analysis of two “regional economies” in Spain. I want to show that the historical perspective is important in order to understand the concrete aspects of these regions where production is increasingly structured as networks of personalized relationships. History enables us to perceive the significance of “culture” in these regional economies, but also the significance of social relations of production in the construction of differentiated local meanings. On the other hand this paper offers a critique of the “industrial district” or network model as a part of the conceptual make up of new development policies in the European Union and elsewhere. Through the comparison of two ethnographic sites I wish to show 1) local differences, and 2) the real life practices of personal relationships that structure these economic networks in the regional economies. The paper points at the way these affective relations that structure the networks are stressed by the competitive market context of which they are a part. These tensions that emerge from the dialectics between universal forms of exploitation and particular forms of oppression such as kinship, produce, paradoxically, a materialization of the social relations that structure personal and collective identities. Last, I will try to show that pose feminist analyses provide us with fundamental tools for the study of the problems that the affectively charged social relations of production that structure the regional economies’ networks.