bhavika289
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FORDISM
POST-FORDISM
Markets
• Mass consumption
• Standardised goods
• Fragmented, niche markets
Technology
• Dedicated to one product
• Standardised products
• General, flexible between product lines
Production
• Mass, assembly-line (economies of scale)
• Short-run, batch production
Workers
• Semi-skilled
• Multi-skilled
Management Strategy
• Taylorist
• Human Relations
Firms
• Large, vertically integrated corporations
• Networks of smaller firms
Unions
• General or industrial unions • No unions or company unionism
Industrial Relations
• Centralised, national bargaining • Decentralised, local or plant level bargaining
Spatial Pattern
• Decentralised branch plants • Centralised: industrial districts
Political System
• Keynesian welfare state • De-regulated, individualised
Cultural System • Standardised, emphasis on quantity • Differentiated, emphasis on quality
RUSTIN
FORDISM POST-FORDISM
Technology
• Low technological innovation
• Accelerated innovation
Products
• Fixed product lines • Variety of products
Marketing
• Mass marketing • Niche marketing
Organisation
• Steep hierarchy
• Vertical chains of command
• Mechanistic
• Bureaucratic • Flat hierarchy
• Lateral communication
• Organic
• Professional / Entrepreneurial
Integration
• Centralised planning
• Vertical and horizontal integration
• Autonomous profit centres
• Network systems
• Internal markets within firms
• Out-sourcing
Collective bargaining
• Mass unions
• Centralised wage-bargaining
• Localised bargaining
• Core : Periphery
Political participation
• Nation-wide class-based parties
• Social movements : regional diversification (nationalism / separatism)
Welfare
• Standardised • Consumer choice
Post-Fordism: Origin of Ideas
1. Fordism - Gramsci: in the Prison Notebooks he endeavoured to explain the rise of Fascism in Italy. He argued that it was a political and cultural response to the economic changes associated with the advent of mass production and mass consumption. This dyad he labelled ‘Fordism’.
This is a classic Marxist attempt to reduce (explain?!) political developments to changes in the sphere of production.
2. Post-Fordism
French ‘regulation school’.
British post-Marxists (cf. New Times).
Regulation School - The Crisis of Fordism
cf. Aglietta and Lipietz: problem of Keynesian welfare capitalism (Fordism?)
• inflation;
• declining rates of profit;
• enhanced power of labour; and,
• ‘decommodification’ of many sectors of production and consumption in response to political pressure.
FORDISM
• Labour process of Fordism is structured around:
1). organisational principles of Taylor;
2). technological innovations of Ford.
• Theorists include Aglietta and Lipietz (i.e. French Marxists).
1. Taylorism (scientific management)
• Separation of mental and manual labour.
• Fragmentation of tasks: increase in the division of labour.
• Deskilling of jobs.
• (Planning of work taken over by management
simplification;
standardisation;
deskilling.)
• Management co-ordinates workplace: utilise time and motion studies.
2. Ford: Highland Park Plant in Detroit in 1913
a. Ford combined mass production system (first developed for gun manufacture earlier in the C19th and labelled the ‘American System’) which used interchangeable, standardised components with the moving assembly line.
b. Also Ford paid his workers well ($5 per day). This helped create the central nexus within Fordism of mass production and mass consumption (a virtuous circle). However, many commentators misconstrue this and slip either into functionalism - $5 per day generated the mass market for cars: which is silly - or assume mass consumption must be premised upon mass production (clearly this is not so. cf. rise of mass consumption in the late C18th Industrial Revolution in Britain).
Fordism reaches its apotheosis in the post-1945 Keynesian compromise: Fordist mass production is regulated by a mass market bolstered by Keynesian welfare measures. In other words, Fordism was the basis upon which the ‘golden age’ of western capitalism was built in the two decades after 1945.
The current era, on the other hand, is witnessing the crisis and/or collapse of Fordism.
Problems
1) Was there an axial principle organising capitalist societies during this period?
2) What is the connection between mass consumption and forms of work?
3) How typical was:
a) the assembly line (Meegan < 12% of manufacturing)?
b) the automobile industry?
c) the assembly line within the automobile industry?
4) What is work like within these environments and how does it translate into wider contexts?
5) Fordism gives a leading role to manufacturing but today less than 20% of the workforce are employed there - what about services?
is it possible to construct a parallel Fordist view of clerical work and retailing?
Production / Market
Little evidence that mass markets are saturated: growth of multi-TV households and multi-cars.
Also growth of new markets - videos, C.D. players, microwave ovens, etc.
• all produced and sold on a mass basis.
Indeed one of the paradoxes of contemporary consumption is that expensive ‘designer’ shirts and shoes are all mass produced yet are consumed as if their cost and logos signify something distinctive about them.
• High volumes central to the production of ‘mechatronics’ (computers, calculators, cameras).
• General tendency towards agglomeration and scale in many markets (cf. globalisation). In the paper industry scale and size of major companies.
Likewise size and concentration in retailing.
• Kaplinsky estimated that 50% of UK Engineering production was in job lots of less than 100 units and 80% less than 500 (1984).
• In 1982 @ 700,000 working on assembly -lines (3% of total employment) [Meegan, 1988] : Williams et al (1987) found that only 31% of plants used assembly lines and only 1/2 of these were mechanically paced.
Discussion
Technology
Emphasis on mechanisation and the assembly-line as core to Fordism. The micro-chip is the core to flexible manufacturing within post-Fordism. It facilitates the production of customised small batches.
The problem is the distinction between small and large batches. Both are traditional features of manufacturing and both co-exist in computerised environments.
Traditional
Computerised
Batch
Size Small
Machines Cars
Components
Large
Textiles
Chemicals
Paper
It is not possible to order a specific car very easily within current systems.
Workers
Skilled workers existed in the Fordist era. They were invisible because of the theoretical assumptions (cf. maintenance craft workers within car plants - The Affluent Worker volumes illustrate this lacuna).
• Skilled workers were important across a wide range of industries - batch production in engineering, process industries like steel, chemicals and paper.
• In each industry there were skilled and nonskilled workers: the balance is a central feature of these industries themselves.
• There are two routes into skilled work:
i) apprenticeship route (eg. engineering, printing and construction); and,
ii) internal trajectory route (e.g. steel, paper, coal, chemicals).
These systems intersect in many cases and this leads to systematic conflict between workers and trade unions over wages, demarcation, jurisdiction and status.
NB Different routes out of Fordism:
a) post-Fordism: in this case anything that is not Fordist post-Fordism
includes diverse and contradictory phenomena (cf. Rustin)
b) neo-Fordism.
POST-FORDISM
Markets
• Mass consumption
• Standardised goods
• Fragmented, niche markets
Technology
• Dedicated to one product
• Standardised products
• General, flexible between product lines
Production
• Mass, assembly-line (economies of scale)
• Short-run, batch production
Workers
• Semi-skilled
• Multi-skilled
Management Strategy
• Taylorist
• Human Relations
Firms
• Large, vertically integrated corporations
• Networks of smaller firms
Unions
• General or industrial unions • No unions or company unionism
Industrial Relations
• Centralised, national bargaining • Decentralised, local or plant level bargaining
Spatial Pattern
• Decentralised branch plants • Centralised: industrial districts
Political System
• Keynesian welfare state • De-regulated, individualised
Cultural System • Standardised, emphasis on quantity • Differentiated, emphasis on quality
RUSTIN
FORDISM POST-FORDISM
Technology
• Low technological innovation
• Accelerated innovation
Products
• Fixed product lines • Variety of products
Marketing
• Mass marketing • Niche marketing
Organisation
• Steep hierarchy
• Vertical chains of command
• Mechanistic
• Bureaucratic • Flat hierarchy
• Lateral communication
• Organic
• Professional / Entrepreneurial
Integration
• Centralised planning
• Vertical and horizontal integration
• Autonomous profit centres
• Network systems
• Internal markets within firms
• Out-sourcing
Collective bargaining
• Mass unions
• Centralised wage-bargaining
• Localised bargaining
• Core : Periphery
Political participation
• Nation-wide class-based parties
• Social movements : regional diversification (nationalism / separatism)
Welfare
• Standardised • Consumer choice
Post-Fordism: Origin of Ideas
1. Fordism - Gramsci: in the Prison Notebooks he endeavoured to explain the rise of Fascism in Italy. He argued that it was a political and cultural response to the economic changes associated with the advent of mass production and mass consumption. This dyad he labelled ‘Fordism’.
This is a classic Marxist attempt to reduce (explain?!) political developments to changes in the sphere of production.
2. Post-Fordism
French ‘regulation school’.
British post-Marxists (cf. New Times).
Regulation School - The Crisis of Fordism
cf. Aglietta and Lipietz: problem of Keynesian welfare capitalism (Fordism?)
• inflation;
• declining rates of profit;
• enhanced power of labour; and,
• ‘decommodification’ of many sectors of production and consumption in response to political pressure.
FORDISM
• Labour process of Fordism is structured around:
1). organisational principles of Taylor;
2). technological innovations of Ford.
• Theorists include Aglietta and Lipietz (i.e. French Marxists).
1. Taylorism (scientific management)
• Separation of mental and manual labour.
• Fragmentation of tasks: increase in the division of labour.
• Deskilling of jobs.
• (Planning of work taken over by management
simplification;
standardisation;
deskilling.)
• Management co-ordinates workplace: utilise time and motion studies.
2. Ford: Highland Park Plant in Detroit in 1913
a. Ford combined mass production system (first developed for gun manufacture earlier in the C19th and labelled the ‘American System’) which used interchangeable, standardised components with the moving assembly line.
b. Also Ford paid his workers well ($5 per day). This helped create the central nexus within Fordism of mass production and mass consumption (a virtuous circle). However, many commentators misconstrue this and slip either into functionalism - $5 per day generated the mass market for cars: which is silly - or assume mass consumption must be premised upon mass production (clearly this is not so. cf. rise of mass consumption in the late C18th Industrial Revolution in Britain).
Fordism reaches its apotheosis in the post-1945 Keynesian compromise: Fordist mass production is regulated by a mass market bolstered by Keynesian welfare measures. In other words, Fordism was the basis upon which the ‘golden age’ of western capitalism was built in the two decades after 1945.
The current era, on the other hand, is witnessing the crisis and/or collapse of Fordism.
Problems
1) Was there an axial principle organising capitalist societies during this period?
2) What is the connection between mass consumption and forms of work?
3) How typical was:
a) the assembly line (Meegan < 12% of manufacturing)?
b) the automobile industry?
c) the assembly line within the automobile industry?
4) What is work like within these environments and how does it translate into wider contexts?
5) Fordism gives a leading role to manufacturing but today less than 20% of the workforce are employed there - what about services?
is it possible to construct a parallel Fordist view of clerical work and retailing?
Production / Market
Little evidence that mass markets are saturated: growth of multi-TV households and multi-cars.
Also growth of new markets - videos, C.D. players, microwave ovens, etc.
• all produced and sold on a mass basis.
Indeed one of the paradoxes of contemporary consumption is that expensive ‘designer’ shirts and shoes are all mass produced yet are consumed as if their cost and logos signify something distinctive about them.
• High volumes central to the production of ‘mechatronics’ (computers, calculators, cameras).
• General tendency towards agglomeration and scale in many markets (cf. globalisation). In the paper industry scale and size of major companies.
Likewise size and concentration in retailing.
• Kaplinsky estimated that 50% of UK Engineering production was in job lots of less than 100 units and 80% less than 500 (1984).
• In 1982 @ 700,000 working on assembly -lines (3% of total employment) [Meegan, 1988] : Williams et al (1987) found that only 31% of plants used assembly lines and only 1/2 of these were mechanically paced.
Discussion
Technology
Emphasis on mechanisation and the assembly-line as core to Fordism. The micro-chip is the core to flexible manufacturing within post-Fordism. It facilitates the production of customised small batches.
The problem is the distinction between small and large batches. Both are traditional features of manufacturing and both co-exist in computerised environments.
Traditional
Computerised
Batch
Size Small
Machines Cars
Components
Large
Textiles
Chemicals
Paper
It is not possible to order a specific car very easily within current systems.
Workers
Skilled workers existed in the Fordist era. They were invisible because of the theoretical assumptions (cf. maintenance craft workers within car plants - The Affluent Worker volumes illustrate this lacuna).
• Skilled workers were important across a wide range of industries - batch production in engineering, process industries like steel, chemicals and paper.
• In each industry there were skilled and nonskilled workers: the balance is a central feature of these industries themselves.
• There are two routes into skilled work:
i) apprenticeship route (eg. engineering, printing and construction); and,
ii) internal trajectory route (e.g. steel, paper, coal, chemicals).
These systems intersect in many cases and this leads to systematic conflict between workers and trade unions over wages, demarcation, jurisdiction and status.
NB Different routes out of Fordism:
a) post-Fordism: in this case anything that is not Fordist post-Fordism
includes diverse and contradictory phenomena (cf. Rustin)
b) neo-Fordism.