Post-Fordist transitions in the periphery: Strategies driving change in microbrewing sector in Hungary – new co-authored article by Erika Nagy in Applied Geography journal

The paper is focused on small-scale beer production in Hungary. Through the insight in small firms’ strategies in this highly competitive sector, we aim to get a more fine-grained understanding of how regime changes (post/socialism, post/Fordism) were interrelated, how it impacted the evolution of a niche industry, and how peripherality manifested in the production of a common drink which has been shifting form a mass-product category towards the realm of symbolic consumption in the past few decades. The analysis rests on a statistical analysis of microbreweries’ data obtained from online sources, interviews conducted with producers, and the triangulation of empirical results. The paper highlights the temporal delay and its structural characteristics of beer revolution in the CEE periphery, and explains, how spatially segmented consumption entailed geographical fault lines in business prospects and strategies of small firms in a niche sector.