Los Angeles School of Urban Studies

The Post-Fordist Turn

The LA School has its roots in urban economic geography, drawing from broad theoretical traditions including structural Marxism, neoclassical economics, and the Regulation School. Edward W. Soja draws from the Marxist-inspired work of David Harvey to argue that a central response to capitalist economic crises has been to reconcentrate certain aspects of capital and labor in certain cities while dispersing others across space. In Los Angeles and other global regions, this has resulted in a process of “extensification” whereby corporations have sought out inexpensive and unorganized sources of labor throughout the developing world. This has led to the deindustrialization of major urban areas in the advanced north.

Concomitantly, key functions (e.g., managerial, finance, and innovation) have been concentrated in several prominent regions in advanced capitalist countries, resulting in profound changes in the physical form (central business districts, science parks, new consumption complexes, etc.) and class structures of these regions. Different processes combined in particularly intense ways in the 1970s and 1980s to restructure the economic logic of Los Angeles.

These researchers also drew insights from the Regulation School to argue that as large industrial plants underwent a process of deindustrialization, those industries that remained in urban regions like Los Angeles were likely to be organized according to post-Fordist principles. They suggested that firms were embracing new models of organizing the production process that centered on more flexible production systems, where small and medium-size firms were linked to one another in clusters of transaction-intensive networks. These changes improved the abilities of firms to reduce uncertainties; respond to new information, trends, and competitors; contain labor costs; and maximize innovation capacities.

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