Post-Fordism is the dominant system of economic production, consumption, and associated socio-economic phenomena in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century.
What is post Fordism in sociology?
major reference. In Fordism: Post-Fordism The term post-Fordism is used to describe both a relatively durable form of economic organization that happened to emerge after Fordism and a new form of economic organization that actually resolves the crisis tendencies of Fordism.
How did production change with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism?
The changes in production with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism were accompanied by changes in the economy, politics, and prominent ideologies. In the economic realm, post-Fordism brought the decline of regulation and production by the nation-state and the rise of global markets and corporations.
What is post-Fordism?
It is contrasted with Fordism, the system formulated in Henry Ford 's automotive factories, in which workers work on a production line, performing specialized tasks repetitively, and organized through Taylorist scientific management. Definitions of the nature and scope of post-Fordism vary considerably and are a matter of debate among scholars.
What is Fordism in macro-scale terms?
As well as being seen as a micro-scale approach to organizing work and mass production in the workplace, Fordism has also come to be seen in macro-scale terms, as a particular way of regulating economy and society and normalizing particular conceptions of social and economic relationships.
What is a post-Fordist economy?
A post-Fordist economy is one in which the dominant production processes, strategies, and paradigms within the economy are characterized by high levels of product innovation, process variability, and labor responsibility.
What does post-Fordism mean sociology?
Post-Fordism is the name given to the dominant system of economic production, consumption and associated socio-economic phenomena, in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century.
What is a post-Fordist society?
Broadly speaking, the term “post-Fordism” refers to the emergence of a new set of organizational, economic, technological, and social configurations to replace those of “Fordist” mass production. The theoretical arguments surrounding “post-Fordism” rest upon the relationships among these constructs.
What is Fordism and post-Fordism in sociology?
Under Fordism, the industrial worker had to work at a pace dictated by the speed of the assembly line. Work was repetitive and often exhausting. Under Post-Fordism, if you have job, you have to work at a speed dictated by computers, and you are competing, wage-wise, with other desperate people in low-wage countries.
What is an example of post-Fordism?
One of the primary examples of specialized post-Fordist production took place in a region known as the Third Italy. The First Italy included the areas of large-scale mass production, such as Turin, Milan, and Genoa, and the Second Italy described the undeveloped South.
What are the main characteristics of post-Fordism?
Post-Fordism is based on the dominance of a flexible and permanently innovative pattern of accumulation. It is based on flexible production, rising incomes for polyvalent skilled workers and the service class and increased profits based on technological and other innovations.
What is a post Fordist city?
It is still a city with firm expectations about where people fit in the social order. Assumptions are in place about the racial and ethnic pecking order, about gender roles etc., The Post-Fordist city might look something like this: It is becoming a decentred galactic metropolis of sub-centres and enclaves.
How did post-Fordism affect workers?
Post Fordism has led to inequalities within the firms between the core workers, who are highly skilled, well paid and enjoy job security and other benefits and the peripheral workers who are usually part time casual workers who are poorly paid and enjoy very few benefits.
What is the concept of Fordism?
Definition of Fordism : a technological system that seeks to increase production efficiency primarily through carefully engineered breakdown and interlocking of production operations and that depends for its success on mass production by assembly-line methods.
How did Fordism impact the economy?
Fordism refers to the system of mass production and consumption characteristic of highly developed economies during the 1940s-1960s. Under Fordism, mass consumption combined with mass production to produce sustained economic growth and widespread material advancement.
What is the difference between Fordism and Taylorism?
While Taylorism decomposed tasks and assigned those tasks to individual workers, Fordism recomposed the tasks by welding the individual labours into a speedy human machine. Added to this was something super-rational--the rationality of work organisation in terms of Taylorism was fully stretched.
What is Fordist and post Fordist?
The key difference between Fordism and Post Fordism is that Fordism refers to the large scale production of identical products, whereas Post Fordism refers to the flexible specialization of production in small batches. The concept of Post Fordism originated when the concept of Fordism fell out of use during the 1970s.
What is flexible specialization?
Flexible specialization is the phenomenon of a closely linked network of firms engaging in the production and distribution of nonstandard, specialized products to cater for ever-changing consumer demands.
What was the shift in research emphasis toward post-Fordism?
The shift in research emphasis toward post-Fordism was associated with a growth in research that explored the functioning of industrial districts or clusters (Scott, 1988 ). It is worth noting that economic geographers during the late 1960s and early 1970s focused on understanding the importance of ‘industrial linkage.’ This early literature reflects geographers' long-term interest in the spatial aspects of interfirm relationships. Industrial linkage is defined “as occurring when one manufacturing firm purchases inputs of goods and services from, or sells outputs to, another manufacturing firm” ( Keeble, 1976: 61). Initially studies emphasized localized linkages, but “linkages can and do occur over considerable distances” ( Keeble, 1976: 61). Industrial linkage is explained by the operation of a division of labor with firms specializing to minimize total production costs and to enhance profitability. The industrial linkage literature did include studies of industrial districts that explored “sharply demarcated ‘swarms’ of small firms in particular industries” ( Keeble, 1976: 62) and perhaps the most famous study is Wise's analysis of the Birmingham jewelry and gun quarters ( 1949 ). An industrial district consists of a territorial system of SMEs. Industrial district studies shifted the research focus away from understanding the activities of single firms to understanding the social characteristics and functions of colocated firms. The research identified distinct agglomerations of firms that specialized in the creation of particular products. A central element of this research was a focus on embeddedness as a key analytical construct ( Granovetter, 1985 ). This approach emphasized the embedding of business activities within much deeper and complex social processes. Much of this literature stressed the importance of localized learning and the transfer of forms of tacit rather than codified knowledge between individuals ( Maskell and Malmberg, 1999 ). Codified knowledge could be relatively easily transferred between individuals and firms, but tacit knowledge could only be transferred through everyday practice and required various forms of face-to-face interaction. This literature also highlighted the relationship between place and entrepreneurship with a focus on cultural, social, economic, and political differences. There are thus important differences between places in terms of the emphasis different cultures place on entrepreneurship as well as differences in the type and availability of factor inputs ( Aoyama, 2009; Barbu et al., 2013 ). Differences in factor inputs include access to finance, business support, and taxation systems intended to encourage entrepreneurial behavior ( Scott, 2006 ).
What was the impact of post Fordism on the 1990s?
In the versions of post-Fordism that gave pride of place to flexible specialization, a very different conception of the causes and requirements of regional (and later urban) development became influential in the 1990s. The relationships between places would now be shaped by competition between them, rather than by their functions in a corporate and state administered division of labor. Post-Fordism means place competition. For some writers, notably the Los Angeles School of Economic Geographers at UCLA and its many followers, this raised the exciting prospect of development of a set of new industrial spaces based on clusters of innovatory firms interacting both through the market and (more importantly) in civil society. Coinciding with—and targeted on—the emergence of a new stratum of policymakers at the regional (later city-regional) level, such cheering claims became very prominent in the 1990s, acquiring the label of the New Regionalism. This highlighted the positive potential of post-Fordism and the new proliferation of subnational units of economic governance (small countries, regions, and city-regions).
How did Fordism shape the economy?
The economic geographies of Fordism were shaped by its characteristic separation between the different functions of the labor process, projected across space. As the sustained growth of national markets led local firms to become national corporations, a new interregional division of labor had formed, guided by the Taylorist separation of functions. Different types of work were allocated to different regions. Some specialized in skilled production tasks and others in deskilled production and assembly. Less-advantaged places specialized in routine production and assembly. But the background context of high national growth rates and full-employment policies ensured a degree of convergence in terms of overall and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) indicators. The era of Fordism was in general one of declining regional and urban disparities. In aggregate terms, if not qualitative ones, employment opportunities spread out from the overheated center to the cooler periphery. At the local level, this often created a de facto territorial compact between places and firms.
Why was Fordism attractive to geographers?
The Fordism into post-Fordism narrative was particularly attractive to geographers because it constructed each term in ways that had immediate spatial implications. It promised both a powerful way to explain empirically observable changes in economic geographies, and suggestions as to how future policies might best capitalize upon emergent trends. The idea that the geographical changes of the 1970s–1990s represented a restructuring of historical significance—the spatial dimension of a fundamental reconstruction of capitalism as a system—became an almost unchallenged orthodoxy.
What was the Fordism era?
The era of Fordism was in general one of declining regional and urban disparities. In aggregate terms, if not qualitative ones, employment opportunities spread out from the overheated center to the cooler periphery. At the local level, this often created a de facto territorial compact between places and firms.
What is the relationship between consumption and production?
It is a central tenet of regulation theory that the relationship between production and consumption is critical in stabilising and underpinning long-term economic growth. However, the exact nature of that link, and indeed the direction of causality between the two areas, has been harder to identify.
What is the new regionalism?
The new regionalism is a term used to describe the research of certain scholars in economic geography and urban and regional planning highlighting how during the era of post-Fordism and globalization, certain regional economies appear to be more capable than others of sustaining relatively successful economic growth.
What is the view of society space?
The view of society–space as a social–spatial formation has been the subject of two principle critiques. The first – against diffusionism – challenged the implied hierarchy between the First and Third World or developed and underdeveloped nations; the second – privileging social reproduction – challenged the primacy of subjects and spaces of production.
What did Storper say about the middle decades of the twentieth century?
Storper, a student from the so-called Los Angeles School of geography and urban planning, surmises that during the middle decades of the twentieth century the region came to represent a residual category in the advanced developed countries.
How does labor control affect spatial mobility?
Knowledge of the geography of labor control explains the increasing spatial mobility of certain branches of industry and factions of capital. The rise of the multilocational firm involves the relocation of particular stages in the labor and production process to places where the requisite labor is more malleable and tractable. In the early and middle twentieth century, branch plants of national enterprises based in Europe and the United States tended to relocate to the suburbs and peripheral regions of host countries, where accordingly more routine aspects of production could expand. By the end of that century, such activities were increasingly likely to be located offshore to newly specialized centers of routine high-technology functions and semiautomated production tasks in the semiperiphery, such as call centers in Bangalore in India, or zones of maquiladora production in northern Mexico.
Is post-productivism radical?
The postulated transition to post-productivism, therefore, should not imply that productivist institutional forms, networks, ideologies, and norms have been superseded, suggesting that post- productivism has not been radical, but rather incremental and accommodationist to productivist action and thought.
Is Fordism a canonical model?
While at one level of abstraction it is possible to speak of a canonical national Fordist regime of accumulation and mode of regulation, in practice ‘actually existing Fordisms’ exhibit variations around this canonical model. This is partly a reflection of the fact that regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation do not simply exist, preformed and awaiting discovery by national states. Moreover, Fordism became established in different national political and cultural contexts, which shaped the particular ways in which distinctive national Fordisms emerged and developed. There are, therefore, national variations around the canonical generic Fordist regime of accumulation. The contrast between the UK and US, West Germany and Sweden, and Japan in the 1980s provides a striking example of the different ways in which national state strategies can develop in the context of the same global economic and political environment. The rise of Fordism to dominance in the US was central to both the transformation of the sociospatial structure of the US and the rise of the US as the globally dominant capitalist power in the twentieth century. The rise of China in the first decade of the twenty-first century provides evidence of the continuation of Fordist mass production in new sociopolitical contexts and the continuing influence of the Chinese Communist Party in an emerging capitalist economy. This particular variant of mass production and consumption is having dramatic effects, at a variety of spatial scales and registers. It is, inter alia, leading to China becoming the major center of production in the global economy for a wide range of goods, especially consumer goods. This in turn is linked to major changes in the international division of labor and patterns of international trade. It is also having fundamentally transformative effects within China: for example, regional inequalities have sharpened enormously as the new export-oriented industries are concentrated on the eastern coast, leading to internal migration on an unprecedented scale and massive urban expansion. Industrial expansion coupled with the rise of a mass-consuming middle class is in turn leading to massive environmental transformation, devastation of the environment, and serious problems of environmental pollution. The coexistence of these national variants was and is permitted by the international monetary system, which left scope for national autonomy in selecting the precise form of Fordist mode of regulation. It is, however, also important to note that some of the most successful – in terms of conventional indicators of growth such as GDP per caput – economies of the latter part of the twentieth century certainly involved mass production and consumption but cannot plausibly be conceptualized as Fordist, such as that of South Korea.
How did post Fordism use Flexibity in employment?
Another means by which post-Fordism employed the concept of flexibity in employment was the introduction of ideas such as ‘cross-training’. Rather than having a one person – one specific job mantra, the new era of productivity espoused employees who were trained to do any number of tasks. This flexible functionality in production employees was adopted by companies with the idea of being able to adapt faster to changing demand and by employees in order to enrich jobs and to gain increased employment security (Pietrykowski, 1999, p. 187); Grint, 1991, pp. 296-297). In addition, firms began to outsource non-core functions such as cleaning or security in order to achieve lower costs and reduce the size of bureaucracies often accompanying large companies (Friedman 2000, p. 71).
How did Taylorism affect Ford Motor Company?
Together, changes introduced in technology and management paved the way to broader sociological changes. At the heart of these was the rise of “management” as controlling influence upon workers. While Taylorism implemented strict measures of control and efficiency to the workers, the organizational impact of Fordism harnessed individual productivity back into the firm. In some ways, practices at the Ford Motor Company were quite progressive such as his “Five Dollar Day” policy by which workers were paid for their time. While significant from a labor perspective, it also merits commented on based on the fact that this was compensation. Not just “pay” but rather compensation for becoming a cog in a wheel and a so-called ‘factor of production’ under somewhat harsh conditions. While some might consider Ford to be generous to pay his employees so a sum, others might not that it could also be viewed as a particularly shrewd means to decrease absenteeism, work interruptions, poor quality and perhaps most importantly, as a means to fend off interest in trade unionization by workers. In fact, once instituted, the results were dramatic as the following were observed, “absenteeism fell from 10% to less than 0.5%… turnover fell from nearly 400% to less than 15%…. productivity rose so dramatically that despite the doubling of wages and shortening of the workday production costs fell” (Clarke, 1992, pp. 20-21).
What was the shift in labor strategy in the 1970s?
Overall, the change in markets and market pressures as well as the shifts in labor strategies that began to be noticeable in the 1970’s, marked the transition of the dominance of a few oligopolistic firms from a half century reign of mass-production to the current period of ‘mass customization’. Seemingly at odds with one another, the terms “mass customization” reveal an dynamic tension that is as evident on the factory floor and is in the market place.
What was the dominant method of work in the past?
With regards to organization and sociological implication, in the past, the dominant method of work was the “craftsman” who was a skilled worker and spent [his] time on creating specialized and unique projects and the family was, in a sense the primary economic unit of production (Pietrykowski, 1999, p. 191). Ford needed relatively few craftsmen but rather he needed many comparatively unskilled workers that were willing to submit to Tayloristic-type management in exchange for “…regularly rising wages… as well as general guarantees of employment security” (Freidman 2000, p. 60). The widespread employment of an emerging American middle class by a growing number of large, vertically integrated oligopolistic firms bred the beginning of mass production. With ever increasing levels of productivity as a result of newer technologies and greater organizational control, more goods were produced at even lower cost levels. Not surprisingly, in return, this brought about new levels of mass consumption of mass-produced products by the burgeoning ranks of the working class (Friedman, 2000, pp. 59-60). This produced a cycle that was both self-reinforcing and self-entrenching.
What was the pursuit of profit?
The pursuit of profit was not a science born perfect. Instead, as one technological or organizational invention after another led to ever increasing rates of incremental improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of the enterprise. These improvements either reduced the cost structure, increased the market demand or both. It was just such an ‘incremental’ improvement in the early twentieth century that led Henry Ford and his Model T to begin an era of ‘namesake’ capitalism that dominated until the 1980’s and persists even today. The methods that began the period of capitalism known as Fordism was not so much just the additional of an assembly line but rather a line that moved to the worker rather that the other way around. This technology of this method was not new, having been utilized in Chicago slaughterhouses since at least the 1890’s but it was the first time that it have been used on such a scale to consumer goods with the end effect of making the automobile affordable. Perhaps even more importantly, the application of this method to automobile production, enabled the use of additional organizational technologies to be deployed. For example, bottlenecks and other production issues could be readily identified and solved and it became possible for a smaller number of managers to ‘control’ the output of a larger group of workers (Grint, 1991, p. 294-295; Clarke, 1992, p. 17). Because of the organizational paradigm shift, these methods were quickly and successfully adopted at other companies in a many different industries.
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The term post-Fordism is used to describe both a relatively durable form of economic organization that happened to emerge after Fordism and a new form of economic organization that actually resolves the crisis tendencies of Fordism. In neither case does the term as such…
major reference
The term post-Fordism is used to describe both a relatively durable form of economic organization that happened to emerge after Fordism and a new form of economic organization that actually resolves the crisis tendencies of Fordism. In neither case does the term as such…
What are the characteristics of the post-Fordist economy?
The post-Fordist regime is characterized by an international division of labor in the production process. Internationalization takes place at three levels: capital, consumption and production.
Sources
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