flexible specialization and the reconfiguration of television production in the UK

This paper sets out to examine the strategic, technological and organizational implications of Piore and Sabel's thesis of ‘industrial divides’— of critical moments in history when the existing logic of organizational and technological development comes to be challenged. This thesis, while very influential in the social sciences, has not received the attention it merits in the discourse o f strategic management. Herein we extend the Piore and Sabel thesis to examine changes currently under way in the UK television (TV) industry. These changes, based on flexibility and the development of network forms of organization in TV production, are broadly supportive of Piore and Sabel's argument. However, when we look at the downstream elements ofthe TV value chain, we see dzffermt forms of reconfiguration at firm and sector levels driven in part by an emerging range of new distribution technologies.