No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Ramen noodle supply geographies in the Kansai region of Japan: Transaction costs and semiotics in the 'make or buy' decision
Abstract
Restaurants are an important part of the cultural economy of, cities. Ramen noodle shops are Japan's most popular type of restaurant. This paper provides a geographical analysis of ramen restaurant noodle supply in the Kansai region centred on Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. The conceptual point of departure is the age old question in transaction cost theory: to make or buy? By drawing on theory in economic geography, this paper illustrates how this decision is constituted also by cognitive and cultural concerns, and communicated via semiotic cues that are evoked in the Japanese concept of kodawari or commitment to authenticity and craftsmanship, as well as the institution of noren wake, which is a form of social reproduction characterized by enduring loose ties between
chefs and the shops where they trained as apprentices. Drawing on three years, of data from 467 ramen shops in the Kansai area published in Kansai Ramen Walker magazine, the author uses ArcGIS to plot restaurant addresses in relation to their mode and location of noodle supply. This method allows for visualization of regional patterns
that are then explored through ramen shop and noodle supplier firm case studies and neighborhood scale analysis. Ramen shop noodle supply is primarily local, either on site, or, procured from suppliers in the Kansai region. This pattern reflects economic efficiency in regards to transaction costs. However, finer grained analysis reveals why the variety of choices seen across the region is shaped by cognitive and culture processes that are
most evident at the neighborhood scale.
The term 'enterprise' relates to both large and small organisations. The geography of enterprise has focused on large industrial concerns and this re-appraisal covers studies dealing with multiplant manufacturing firms. It seems that, first, the enterprise is an important area-organising institution. Secondly, an understanding of the influence of multiproduct, multiplant enterprises on industrial-location change and regional economic development has been enhanced in the last five years.-A.F.Pitty
Focuses on the polycentric urban region concept of city planning. Overview of the concept; Factors affecting the growth of cities and towns; Demise of the basic monocentric model at an intraurban level
Spurred by the classic work of Dunning, MNE location has become the focus of a growing body of research in the field. In this paper we argue that international business (IB) research examining the spatial dimension has serious weaknesses, stemming from its traditional assumption of the country as the location unit of analysis. While border-crossing remains the key research context of IB, placing it within a general spatial framework that recognizes both international and subnational spatial heterogeneity opens up vast new vistas for research. Analyzing MNEs as border-crossing multi-location enterprises allows the researcher to distinguish between (discrete) border effects and (continuous) distance effects and undertake a more fine-grained analysis of location. Within such analysis national borders may appear as qualitative discontinuities in space, that is, points at which spatial heterogeneity changes abruptly. However, subnational spatial heterogeneity is often the characteristic that drives firm strategy as MNEs decide to locate in particular agglomerations and not at random locations within a country. The complex firms that IB scholars study typically include multiple units within the same country, so that a complete analysis requires considering both subnational distance effects as well as international border effects.
The many competing schools of thought concerning themselves with industrial clusters have at least one thing in common: they all agree that clusters are real life phenomena characterized by the co-localization of separate economic entities, which are in some sense related, but not joined together by any common ownership or management. So hierarchies they are certainly not. Yet, it is usually taken for granted that clusters, almost regardless of how they are defined, all expatriate the 'swollen middle' of various hybrid 'forms of long-term contracting, reciprocal trading, regulation, franchising and the like' residing somewhere between hierarchies and markets. This fundamental (but usually implicit) assumption would, perhaps, be justified if markets could be reduced to events of exchange of property rights, between large numbers of price-taking anonymous buyers and sellers supplied with perfect information as they are commonly conceived in mainstream economics. One of the original attractions of Neoclassical price theory was precisely that it promised a way of analysing the economy in general and market exchange in particular independently of specific institutional settings. However, introducing transaction costs as more than fees paid to intermediaries leads inevitably to comparative institutional analysis and, not to be forgotten, to the perception of markets as institutions with specific characteristics of their own. Some sets of characteristics are so common that they represent a specific market organization or market form. The cluster is one such specific market organization that is structured along territorial lines because this enables the building of a set of institutions that are helpful in conducting certain kinds of economic activities.
Local food systems' movements, practices, and writings pose increasingly visible structures of resistance and counter-pressure to conventional globalizing food systems. The place of food seems to be the quiet centre of the discourses emerging with these movements. The purpose of this paper is to identify issues of 'place', which are variously described as the 'local' and 'community' in the local food systems literature, and to do so in conjunction with the geographic discussion focused on questions and meanings around these spatial concepts. I see raising the profile of questions, complexity and potential of these concepts as an important role and challenge for the scholar-advocate in the realm of local food systems, and for geographers sorting through them. Both literatures benefit from such a foray. The paper concludes, following a 'cautiously normative' tone, that there is strong argument for emplacing our food systems, while simultaneously calling for careful circumspection and greater clarity regarding how we delineate and understand the 'local'. Being conscious of the constructed nature of the 'local', 'community' and 'place' means seeing the importance of local social, cultural and ecological particularity in our everyday worlds, while also recognizing that we are reflexively and dialectially tied to many and diverse locals around the world.
This article is concerned with the alleged absence in economic geography of a particular microtheoretical foundation that spells out precisely what makes the central actor of the subdiscipline, “the firm,” behave and perform the way it does. It especially maintains that economic geography is characterized by the lack of a clear conception and understanding of why this specific form of organizing economic activity exists and prevails in a specialized exchange economy, the factors conditioning its size and boundaries, and the endogenous mechanisms that influence its mode of external interaction. The article proposes that theories developed in neighboring fields—particularly economics—can be identified, selected, and subsequently applied within economic geography by developing a selection mechanism based on a few simple criteria.
This article builds a theoretical framework to help explain governance patterns in global value chains. It draws on three streams of literature – transaction costs economics, production networks, and technological capability and firm-level learning – to identify three variables that play a large role in determining how global value chains are governed and change. These are: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) the ability to codify transactions, and (3) the capabilities in the supply-base. The theory generates five types of global value chain governance – hierarchy, captive, relational, modular, and market – which range from high to low levels of explicit coordination and power asymmetry. The article highlights the dynamic and overlapping nature of global value chain governance through four brief industry case studies: bicycles, apparel, horticulture and electronics.
In economic theory, one can distinguish between variety as a source of regional knowledge spillovers, called Jacobs externalities, and variety as a portfolio protecting a region from external shocks. We argue that Jacobs externalities are best measured by related variety (within sectors), while the portfolio argument is better captured by unrelated variety (between sectors). We introduce a methodology based on entropy measures to compute related variety and unrelated variety. Using data at the NUTS-3 level in the Netherlands for the period 1996-2002 we find that Jacobs externalities enhance employment growth, while unrelated variety dampens unemployment growth. Productivity growth can be explained by traditional determinants including investments and R&D expenditures. Implications for regional policy follow
Understanding and conceptualizing the complexities of the contemporary global economy is a challenging but vitally important task. In this article, we critically evaluate the potential of one interpretive framework—the global production networks (GPN) perspective—for analysing the global economy and its impacts on territorial development. After situating the approach in relation to other cognate chain/network approaches, the article proceeds to review and evaluate a number of underdeveloped areas that need to be understood and incorporated more fully if the framework is to deliver on its early potential. The article concludes with a consideration of the key research issues facing work in this area.
We would like to thank Jamie Peck and Ros Whitehead for their efficient handling of the review process of this special issue. We are grateful to all the paper presenters and participants in the three paper sessions on “Global Production Networks” at the Philadelphia centennial meeting of the Association of American Geographers in March 2004 for their important contributions to the development of global production networks as a research paradigm in economic geography. We would also like to thank the authors who have subsequently developed their papers specifically for this special issue and waited patiently for the issue to be published. And finally, our sincere thanks to Neil Coe and Peter Dicken for their critical and constructive comments on a first draft of this essay. However, we are solely responsible for the content in this editorial.
In this paper, case-study evidence of the composition of four robot production systems is provided to reveal the linkages between local, regional, and national social divisions of labour. The relation-specific skill epitomizes the sophisticated procedures used to compose production systems, and the four case studies provide evidence of the communalities and varieties of these procedures. The geography of the interrelationships of the vertical divisions of labour of design-supplied suppliers and of the horizontal division of labour of design-approved suppliers is discussed. The cooperation and competition within this social division of labour allows Japan to function as a flexible manufacturing system.
Key Messages
This study identifies three types of agglomeration in the Japanese ramen restaurant industry.
These clusters are known through various spatial vernacular cues: maps, images, stories, and other lore that circulate in mainstream, esoteric, and fan social network communities.
Waseda University is a key local institution in shaping the reputation of Tokyo's most famous ramen cluster, centred on Takadanobaba Station.
Within economic geography there has been a growing body of work that straddles the disciplinary boundaries of management studies and international business (IB) scholarship. Whilst this growing cross-disciplinary proximity may be related to increasing numbers of economic geographers being located in business and management schools, this report argues that it also corresponds to a growing fruitful and productive cross-disciplinary interest from both management studies and international business. It contends that there is growing epistemological and theoretical common ground between both these disciplines and economic geography which reflects a shift towards spatial thinking being increasingly evident in the empirical and conceptual concerns of management and IB scholars. The report reviews two major elements to this intersection within the recent economic geographical literature – what might loosely be termed the ‘new management geography’ and a broad range of work that brings together the thinking of economic geographers and IB scholarship concerned within firm internationalization.
SIEM (Spaces of International Economy and Management) is an innovative, international, and multidisciplinary research group created in 2007. SIEM meetings and presentations have been conducted at the Association of Japanese Geographers (AJG) and the Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG) to promote understanding of new spaces of global business and to build a community representing a wide spectrum of perspectives regarding management geography. The community of those interested in what we call “management geography” has grown to 250 members. Organizing the first international symposium, we called for speakers from the science of management geography to present fresh ideas and research results in the spirit of building cross-disciplinary cooperation and to create a breakthrough event displaying all contributions to the discipline of management geography. This book is a collection of selected and revised papers that were presented at the international conference held in March 2010 at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. Recent leaders in economic geography such as Nigel Thrift (2000), Henry Yeung (2010), and Andrew Jones (2007) and management scientists like Tetsuo Abo (2004) and Michael Peng (2009) have presented significant work in the emerging field of management geography and provided potential leads to a new avenue of geographic studies. Their work focuses on international managers and entrepreneurs.
A rich, salty, and steaming bowl of ramen noodle soup climbed its way onto the international culinary scene and, from Tokyo to New York, is now a symbol of the cultural prowess of Japanese cuisine. In this highly original account of geopolitics and industrialization in Japan, George Solt traces the meteoric rise of ramen from humble fuel for the working poor to an international icon of Japanese culture. Ramen’s popularity can be attributed to political and economic change on a global scale. Using declassified U.S. government documents and an array of Japanese sources, Solt reveals how the creation of a black market for American wheat imports during the U.S. Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), the reindustrialization of Japan’s labor force during the Cold War, and the elevation of working-class foods in redefining national identity during the past two decades of economic stagnation (1990s-2000s), all contributed to the formation of ramen as a national dish. This book is essential reading for scholars, students in Japanese history and food studies, and anyone interested in gaining greater perspective into how international policy can influence everyday foods around the world.
Previous studies examining food choice from a cross-cultural perspective were based primarily on quantitative research using the Food Choice Questionnaire (FCQ). This study suggests ethnography as a complementary research method in cross-cultural food choice studies.
While use of the FCQ resulted in findings of cultural differences in food choice processes, within a preliminary motive list, ethnography allows the exploration of new, possibly culture-specific motives for food choice. Moreover, ethnography allows a deeper understanding of the cultural background of food choice processes in a studied culture.
Using Japan as a case study, this research demonstrates the use of ethnography to argue that variety is a primary motive for food choice in contemporary Japanese culture. Variety is hence regarded here as a part of a larger food culture attribute, an “adventurous palate,” which can also provide a background for previous FCQ findings (Prescott, Young, O'neill, Yau, & Stevens, 2002).
Recently some economic geographers have drawn our attention to what are alleged to be fundamental changes in production, based on the adoption of more flexible machines and labour within firms, and more flexible relations between firms. Certain spatial implications such as reagglomeration of production are said to have resulted from these changes, or are believed to be underway. This paper critically examines these contentions by setting out the fundamental elements of these changes, considering the degree of their pervasiveness throughout western economies, and the extent to which such changes really do represent a distinct break with the past history and geography of production. In doing so, this paper seeks to uncover the true motivations underlying technological change in the workplace, exposing some common misconceptions about the new flexible production methods and their impacts.
The Japanese travel and tourism industries reflect contradictions between goals to internationalize and fears about vanishing Japanese cultural traditions. This article discusses the nostalgia underlying the popularity of domestic tourism to rural areas in search of reunion with Japanese identity. It explores furusato (home village) imagery in travel advertising and in movies depicting travel in terms of its appeal to contemporary feelings of "homelessness" among many urban Japanese. It also discusses the impact of nostalgia tourism on remote areas recently transformed into popular travel destinations. It explores the decontextualization of place in simulated experiences of rural areas such as local place fairs hosted by city department stores, and various other consumer offerings of pseudotravel experiences for busy urbanites.
In the complex set of economic, social, political and cultural processes which interact to create a continuously changing and uneven geographical structure of economic activity the role of the business enterprise remains central. This paper first addresses Walker's (1989) critique of "corporate geography' and argues that business organization does matter. Particular emphasis is placed upon the need to take a broader socio-organizational view of the business enterprise in which transactional relationships between, and within, business organizations are conceptualized in terms of differential power relationships within interdependent production systems. Both intra- and inter-firm structures are best seen as complex networks of enormous diversity. Business organizations organize production systems but are themselves produced through an historical process of embedding. Geographical industrialization needs to be seen not only in terms of changing industry trajectories but also in terms of dynamic webs of power relationships. -Authors
This article introduces the Japanese concept of kodawari—meaning obession and a detailed personal aesthetic—as an analytical category to think about the process by which everyday foods are valorized as gourmet. I show that the kodawari of chefs and consumers influence each other and combine to create an aesthetic appreciation of rāmen noodles, elevating it from its inexpensive background to an object of gourmet desire in contemporary Japan. kodawari is an individual experience, and chefs develop their own techniques to make their rāmen bowls stand out. Likewise, consumers learn to appreciate the personal touches of chefs and shops, while at the same time developing their own complex sensorial appreciation for rāmen from their individual vantage point. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rāmen shops in Tokyo with chefs and aficionados, this article shows how their efforts result in the valorization of an everyday food item.
A few suppliers to manufacturers are now working to build brand
preference or consumer franchise. Discusses the success of NutraSweet in
obtaining long-term supply contracts, despite patent expiration; it can
be attributed to building such consumer franchise successfully through
an ingredient branding strategy that included both their original
equipment manufacturers' customers and the end consumer. To be
successful, such a branding effort requires a multifaceted strategy, one
which must include collaboration with manufacturers as well as direct
consumer promotion. Emphasizes this point with an analysis of the
current “Intel Inside” campaign, an ingredient branding
strategy being employed by the Intel Corporation, a supplier of
microprocessor chips to the personal computer industry. Intel's efforts
represent a particularly demanding test of ingredient branding because
both the PC industry and those which supply it are both
technology-driven and extremely price competitive. Despite these
obstacles, Intel appears to be making its investment work.
Brazil's automobile component parts industry shows that vertical integration and scale economies endure within flexible production systems. Recent neoliberal economic reforms propelled vehicle assemblers to adopt flexible modes of production and subcontract component manufacturing. However, transactional hazards in supply chains escalated as first-tier subsystem assemblers had to rely on small, opportunistic, and inefficient parts makers. Large tier one suppliers purchased existing parts makers and invested in greenfield facilities to service both new flexibly organized vehicle assembly plants in southern Brazil and Argentina and restructured assembly plants in the traditional automobile complex of São Paulo. We focus on Dana Corporation, Bradesco Bank, and British Tyre and Rubber Corporation—firms that assemble chasses, engines, and body subsystems, respectively. These companies dominate their segment of the parts industry, delivering subsystems to a growing network of flexible vehicle assembly plants throughout Brazil. Large-batch parts production, subsystem assembly by a few major multinational tier one suppliers, and ownership consolidation underscore the continued role of vertical integration and scale economies in automobile production chains.
Through their highly controlled production systems Japanese auto-makers have succeeded to a considerable degree in extending the basic principles of modern factory production–specialisation and timing–to regional space. Thousands of firms, large and small, hierarchically connected in subcontracting layers supply a myriad of parts and engineering services to the auto-makers. Automakers minimise the level of stocks of parts at their plants by requiring their direct suppliers to make frequent deliveries. These firms function as extensions of the auto-maker's plant with the result that the regional production system functions with precision approaching that of a single well-organised factory.
In this article, trade is conceptualized as a cultural as well as an economic and political process. In this view, exporting connects market intelligence with production intelligence on either side of national, typically cultural, borders. These connections frequently imply alternative, mutually influencing, forms of communication and learning that have various implications for local development. A model of relational market intelligence is outlined as a way of understanding this dimension of exporting. The model integrates production and market intelligence while emphasizing alternative pathways of learning and communication. It is applied to the newly emergent trade that features the export of houses from British Columbia to Japan. Within an extended case-study research design framework, information is based on interviews with manufacturing firms and related organizations in British Columbia. Implications for local development in British Columbia are noted.
In a recent round table about Antipode's radical geographies, contributors argued that the journal needed more papers which stimulated debate, were accessible to academics and non-academics alike, didn’t “preach to the cognoscenti”, were written to fit into radical teaching agendas, and were diverse and eclectic in style (Waterstone 2002:663; Hague 2002). This paper has been written to fit this bill. It outlines the findings of multi-locale ethnographic research into the globalization of food, focusing on a supply chain stretching from UK supermarket shelves to a Jamaican farm, and concluding in a North London flat. It addresses perspectives and critiques from the growing literature on the geographies of commodities, but presents these academic arguments “between the lines” of a series of overlapping vignettes about people who were (un)knowingly connected to each other through the international trade in fresh papaya, and an entangled range of economic, political, social, cultural, agricultural and other processes also shaping these connections in the early 1990s. The research on which it is based was initially energized by David Harvey's (1990:422) call for radical geographers to “get behind the veil, the fetishism of the market”, to make powerful, important, disturbing connections between Western consumers and the distant strangers whose contributions to their lives were invisible, unnoticed, and largely unappreciated. Harvey argued that radical geographers should attempt to de-fetishise commodities, re-connect consumers and producers, tell fuller stories of social reproduction, and thereby provoke moral and ethical questions for participants in this exploitation who might think they’re decent people. This paper has been written to provoke such questions, to provide materials to think through and with, for geography's ongoing debates about the politics of consumption.
Drawing upon research from a cluster and innovation systems perspective, we counter the argument that the food industry is a mature and dying industry and point to evidence of a vibrant, dynamic food sector that has made a substantial contribution to regional growth. Since the mid-1990s, the most dynamic component of the Toronto urban food economy has been the small- and medium-sized enterprises, comprised mainly of specialty, local, ethnic, and organic food-processing firms that are thriving in response to consumers' demands for high-quality, local, fresh ethnic and fusion cuisine. However, these newer firms face challenges, and our results raise the question about how a more stimulating innovative milieu can be created for them. In answer to this question, we suggest multiscaled approaches to cluster formation and policy and discuss the implications of our research for theories of innovation systems, firms, city creativity, and governance. We situate this “new food economy” within the core literature of economic geography, seeking to relocate the “agrifood” literature away from a traditional rural setting to a dynamic city-region context, underscoring the essential role of the consumption side of agrifood chains. Moreover, we use the food sector as a lens through which to argue that mature sectors and “ordinary” activities in a city are every bit as important to the long-term health, viability, and sustainability of a city-region economy.
This book is about the renaissance of cities in the twenty first century and their increasing role as centers of creative economic activity. It attempts to put some conceptual and descriptive order around issues of urbanization in the contemporary world, emphasizing the idea of the social economy of the metropolis, which is to say, a view of the urban organism as an intertwined system of social and economic life played out through the arena of urban space. The book opens with a review of some essentials of urban theory, the book aims to re-articulate the urban question in a way that is relevant to city life and politics in the present era. It then analyses the functional characteristics of the urban economy, with special reference to the rise of a group of core sectors such as media, fashion, music, etc., focused on cognitive and cultural forms of work. These sectors are growing with great rapidity in the world's largest cities at the present time, and they play a major role in the urban resurgence that has been occurring of late. The discussion then explores the spatial ramifications of this new economy in cities and the ways in which it appears to be ushering in major shifts in divisions of labor and urban social stratification, as marked by a growing divide between a stratum of elite workers on the one side and a low-wage proletariat on the other. Allen Scott is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the economies of modern cities, and in this book presents a concise introduction to his innovative and insightful perspective. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199549306/toc.html
This paper sketches out how the ways in which a combination of economic geography and international business approaches can shed light on the spatial behaviour of multinational companies. The emphasis of the argument here is on the nature of the knowledge content embedded in the transactions of the firm with the surrounding environment. In order to demonstate the analytical power of these combined approaches we examine the case of an apparently pardoxical observation relating to globalization and internationalization. By adopting an economy geography-international business lens it is possible to provide a clear explanation of the observation, the result of which is that paradox disappears. © The Author (2010). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
A business school perspective to Corporate Geography is offered. The mission is to provide an executive with operational tools for the creation of wealth. A search for the tools is better initiated with manufacturers and retailers. Individuality among corporations and markets makes deductive theories hazardous, a fact shown by examples from IKEA, Scania and Volvo Truck. Case studies, classified by a competitive situation, are seen as a more practicable alternative. From a large number of cases typical patterns can be derived. Anomalies indicate substandard or outstanding behavior. Their explanation contributes to the executive tool set. A unified approach of the currently scattered pieces is propagated.
There is a strand of thinking on service work which sees it as significantly different from other kinds of work due to the `emotional’ as well as the physical and mental labour which it entails. This study seeks to investigate and compare the `emotional labour’ involved in traditional service work and fast food service work. It examines whether there are significant differences in the kind or degree of emotional labour demanded in the more personalised service of traditional restaurant outlets from that required in the standardised service provided in fast food restaurants and whether workers develop and adopt different strategies for dealing with the emotional demands placed on them.
This paper investigates manufacturer-supplier relationships in Japan based on field research on two major industries. I first show that various modes of relations exist and that longstanding relations are more densely distributed where customized parts are transacted. Then I show that this phenomenon can be ascribed to ratings exercised by the purchasing firm on some skill accumulated by each supplier. I construct the concept of multidimensional relation-specific skill accumulated by each supplier through learning and technological investments, and relate this concept to Aoki's work on relational quasi-rent and Williamson's scheme to classify transactions.
On Sunday mornings, teenagers crowd the sidewalks of Tokyoâs Shibuya district until they spill over the curbs and into the streets. They start at Hachiko Square, under a video monitor that takes up the entire face of a glass and steel high-rise, and spread out, 30 or 40 wide in the crosswalks. They mill around displays stacked with new sneakersâNike and New Balance from the United States, Puma and Adidas from Europe via New York. They gather in a small music store that specializes in the American vinyl records played in Tokyoâs popular soul barsâGrandmaster Flash, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament. They spend 370 yen (roughly
SCHOENBERGER E. (1987) Technological and organizational change in automobile production: spatial implications, Reg. Studies 21, 199–214. The origins and implications of recent technological and organizational changes in the automobile industry are examined. The nature of competition in the industry is linked to the adoption of flexible automation technologies in production. This, it is argued, may foster the spatial re-integration of production in contrast to earlier decentralizing trends, an effect that may be reinforced by the move to just-in-time principles of production organization. Implications for regional development are considered with cautions stressed concerning the meaning of spatial proximity and the firm's ability to construct agglomeration economies away from traditional industrial centres.
This article tests a transactions cost theory of vertical integration with data from the U.S. automobile industry. Existing theory is first refined to take into account industrial know-how and the cost of transferring such know-how. A testable model is then developed, which is estimated by using probit techniques. The results support the view that transactions cost considerations surrounding the development and deepening of human skills have important ramifications for delineating efficient organizational boundaries.
In this paper findings are presented from survey work conducted with producers of specialist livestock products in the Scottish - English borders. Using supply-chain diagrams, the paper highlights how specialist livestock businesses operate individual or customised supply chains. The heterogeneity of surveyed producer initiatives throws into question both the simple conceptual distinction drawn between the labels 'conventional' and 'alternative' and also what is meant by a 'short' food supply chain. The starting point of the specialist food chain is clearly not the point of production but rather a series of upstream supply links -- as is found in conventional food chains. Likewise, 'alternative' producers are regularly obliged, or choose, to 'dip in and out' of different conventional nodes downstream of the business, such as abattoirs, processors, and wholesalers. In practice, delimitations between 'alternative' and 'conventional' food supply chains are often blurred and are better characterised as 'hybrid spaces'.
The logging sector in Oregon is characterized by extensive subcontracting between wood-commodity manufacturing firms and independent logging contractors. Why is this so? Considerable recent scholarship has examined the dynamics of flexible production systems, including regional contractor networks, as prominent aspects of late capitalism. Although useful, existing accounts of flexibility are inadequate to explain why logging in particular would be subject to contract production relations. A second literature emphasizes the 'difference' of nature-centered sectors, particularly industrial agriculture. I argue that a similar logic applies to logging. That is, natural sources to unpredictable variation and extensive, inconstant geographies restrict the predictability and calculability of production, and the imposition of labor monitoring and discipline. Contracts are a strategy for firms to displace resulting risks and costs onto contractors, while at the same time inducing expert-based rationalization of production. Repeat contracting provides a means of capturing expert knowledge among reliable contractors with knowledge of the parent firm's lands and mills. This is a particularly appealing strategy for vertically and horizontally integrated firms with complex operational portfolios. However, though contracting is one flexibility strategy, Weyerhaeuser's Competitive Logging Program featuring restructured wage relations provides an alternative path to more flexible production, one that further illuminates some of the problems of nature-based production.