Invisible factories : the informal economy and industrial development in Spain /

Benton uses Spanish industrial restructuring in the 1970s as an example of a middle-level national economy, at a point somewhere between dependency and development, that has moved past earlier constructs (in this case, Francoist corporativism) into a full range of modern industrial experience. The author uses a technique that stresses the anthropology of work--in her words, what workers do: what they strive for and how they react to the changing economic and political climate. She focuses on the rise of decentralized production in the new free market by examining workers on the margins, such as the high-tech electronics cottage industry of Madrid or the Alicante sweatshops in the shoe industry. The history of these "invisible factories" is interesting to anyone caught up in the recent transformation of Spain, particularly because the monograph contains excellent information on recent changes in national economic policies, gender issues, and the changing nature of Spanish labor movements. For upper-division and graduate collections. R. W. Kern University of New Mexico