Flexible Crossroads

The Restructuring of British Columbia’s Forest Economy

Roger Hayter,

Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

Flexible Crossroads

The Restructuring of British Columbia’s Forest Economy

Roger Hayter,

British Columbia’s forest economy is at a crucial crossroads. Its survival, Roger Hayter argues, rests on its ability to remain flexible and open to innovation – a future by no means assured given recent policy initiatives and the current contested nature of British Columbia’s forests. Flexible Crossroads looks at the contemporary restructuring of British Columbia’s forest economy, demonstrating how both resource dynamics – the transition from old growth to managed forests – and industrial dynamics – changing technology and global market forces – have shaped this transformation. Conceptually, the restructuring is portrayed as a shift from a commodity-based, cost-minimizing production system (Fordism) to a more product-differentiated, value-maximizing production system informed by the imperative of flexibility.

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Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Acronyms

Part 1: Global and Historical Perspective

1 Global Industrial Transformation, Resource Peripheries, and the Canadian Model

2 Life on the Geographic Margin: The Evolution of British Columbia’s Forest Economy from the 1880s to the 1970s

3 Booms, Busts, and Forest Reregulation in an Age of Flexibility

Part 2: The Anatomy of Change

4 MacMillan Bloedel: Corporate Restructuring and the Search for Flexible Mass Production

5 Foreign Direct Investment: Help or Hindrance?

6 Small Firms: Towards Flexible Specialization in B.C.’s Forest Economy

7 Trade Patterns and Conflicts: Continentalism Challenged by the Pacific

8 Employment and the Contested Shift to Flexibility

9 The Diversification of Forest-Based Communities: Local Development as an Unruly Process

10 Environmentalism and the Reregulation of British Columbia’s Forests

11 The B.C. Forest-Product Innovation System and the (Frustrating) Search for a Knowledge-Based Culture

12 The B.C. Forest Economy as a Local Model

References

Index

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