The Dictionary of Human Geography

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accounts of the depoliticization of develop-

ment have been essayed by Peter Uvin

(1998) on aid agencies in Rwanda, John

Harriss (2001) on the banalities of Robert

Putnam’s work onsocial capital theories

and David Mosse (2005) on the power effects

of a major UK aid project in India. It is here

perhaps, and in explorations of the ways in

which development thinking continues to

express Western anxieties or fantasies about

‘itself’ (Gilman, 2003), that post-development

thought has most to offer. sco

Suggested reading

Cooper and Packard (1998); Escobar (1995);

Ferguson (1990); Watts (2003).

post-Fordism A set of production tech-

niques that are more flexible than those asso-

ciated withfordismand are used as part of

flexible accumulation. The techniques have

three main characteristics: (1) flexibility is

emphasized both in the skills of workers (who

may be part-time to allow their flexible

deployment as and when there is demand for

a product) and in the functionality of

machines that need to be reprogrammable

and useable for producing a variety of different

products; (2) vertical disintegration rather

than vertical integration, as production relies

on a close-knitnetworkof suppliers who can

quickly respond to changes in demand; and

(3) an emphasis on accurate and high-quality

final products because of thejust-in-time

productionand the selectivity of consumers.

Post-Fordism is often said to have emerged in

response to thecrisisconditions of the 1970s,

when Fordism as amode of productionand

regime of accumulationbecame unstable.

However, others have pointed out that in real-

ity many of the techniques associated with

post-Fordism have existed since before the

emergence of Fordism itself and were simply

reinvented in the early 1980s (Gertler, 1988;

Amin, 1994). Indeed, the term ‘after-Fordism’

was used by Peck and Tickell (1994) in recog-

nition of the lack of a coherent set of principles

underlying post-Fordism and the way in which

elements of both Fordism and flexible accumu-

lation often coexist in the production tech-

niques and strategies of firms.

For geographers, post-Fordismisinextricably

linked withthe region orcluster, becauseofthe

importance ofagglomerationandlocaliza-

tioneconomies for flexible production. jf

posthumanism An intellectual and cultural

style of work, evident incritical theory,

architecture,philosophyand the social sci-

ences, that emphasizes the impurities involved

in becoming human, oriented against a human-

ist tradition that has long been the dominant

mode of understanding in thehumanitiesand

social sciences. Where humanism supposes

that humans, with their capacities for ration-

ality, consciousness, ingenuity, soul, language

and so on, stand at the centre of social action

and can transcend the natural realm, posthu-

man work insists that all of these capacities

are achieved with the help of many others

(including non-humans). Two related bodies

of theoretical understanding are often used to

make such claims (Braun, 2004a). The first

draws upon new forms of vitalism (Watson,

1998), associated with readings of Henri

Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, where matters

as elusive as consciousness, mind,memory

and other repositories often labelled quintes-

sentially human, are taken to be nothing more

and nothing less than complex movements of

matter. Some of this style of working has been

taken up under the label ofactor-network

theory. The second intervention draws more

upondeconstructivetraditions, and demon-

strates the impossibility of a purely human

subject (Badmington, 2000). In the latter the

human project, or anthropological machine as

Agamben (2002) has called it, can be demon-

strated to be little other than an always partial

differentiation of humans from non-humans,

frequently taking the form of human/animal

distinctions. While the prefix ‘post’ can some-

times be read as describing a newly emergent

historical condition, wherein a once pure

human is increasingly in danger of being

made extinct by the growth of prosthetics,

genetic technologies, new reproductive tech-

nologies and so on (Fukuyama, 2002), such

historicismmisses the point. The contention

is that the human and humanist project has

always been a fraught and heterogeneous

endeavour, involving more than human

beings, even if the promiscuities have

achieved new forms and intensities (Hayles,

1999). The result is a challenge to re-imagine

the social of social science and the human of

human geography. It is also a politicization

of many suppressed things once left at the

margins of human debate. Posthumanism,

positively spun, involves ‘Mixing wild imagin-

ings with routine inventiveness,. .. [herald-

ing] a politicisation of the technologies of life

in which intellectual disputes and public con-

troversies become inextricably entangled in

the event offoodscares, organ harvesting,

genetic profiling and any number of other

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_P Final Proof page 564 1.4.2009 3:20pm

POST-FORDISM