By the late 1980s it was evident th

By the late 1980s it was evident that information technology was greatly reducing the costs of decentralised coordination, thereby encouraging the use of markets at the expense of hierarchies. 'Low cost computation favors electronic markets by simplifying complex product descriptions and reducing asset specificity.'21 There were clear implications for corporate strategy: 'All firms should consider whether more of the activities they currently perform internally could be performed less expensively or more flexibly by outside suppliers whose selection and work could be coordinated by computer-based systems.'22 Increasingly this was precisely what happened: 'enhanced information control methods through computers and lowered transportation costs made it possible for firms to subcontract whole stages of the production process to producers across the world. Not only, then, was the production process itself fragmented and transformed, but the social communities tied to formerly integrated production sites were fragmented and disrupted in an economic-social process widely understood as "deindustrialisation