A Global Battleground

a wider justice for folks still on the land."2 The flexibility brought by the new information and communications technology enhances the degree to which diversified and dispersed production forms can absorb new technologies and knowledge. In fact, even in industry it is now being argued that we are in an era when mass production is being replaced by 'flexible specialisation', corporate hierarchies arc proving ineffective and being 'flattened', and bureaucratic forms are giving way to more autonomous teams of workers. The household form (particularly once the heavy hand of patriarchy is overcome) in intensive smallholding agriculture proves to be a kind of paradigm of the new 'small is beautiful' model.