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Something funny happened in the early 1980s. The region, long considered an interesting topic to historians and geographers, but not considered to have any interest for mainstream western social science, was rediscovered by a group of heterodox political economists, sociologists, political scientists and geographers. Not that no attention had been paid to regions by social scientists before that: in regional economics, development economics, and economic geography, regional growth and decline, patterns of location of economic activity, and regional economic structure were well-developed domains of inquiry. But such work treated the region as an outcome of deeper political economic processes, not as a fundamental unit of social life in contemporary capitalism equivalent to, say, market states or families, nor a fundamental process in social life, such as technology, stratification, or interestseeking behavior. Economic geography was a second-orderempirical topic for social science.

In the early 1980s, in contrast, it was asserted that the region might be a fundamental basis of economic and social life ‘after mass production.’That is, since new successful forms of production different from the canonical mass production systems of the post-war period were emerging in some regions and not others, and since they seemed to involve both localization and regional differences and specificities (institutional, technological), it followed that there might be something fundamental which linked late twentieth-century capitalism, regionalism, and regionalization.