After Fordism

By definition, a production model organises management principles and relationships with subcontractors and competitors — along with principles for managing industrial relations — into a coherent whole. The concept is not strictly microeconomic, given that it also organises the interdependancies between company strategy, industrial relations and even macroeconomic regulation, which makes it a useful intermediate mesoeconomic concept that allows us to make the transition from the company level to overall dynamics, and vice versa.

The industrialised economies are distinguished by the pressures they create for innovation, their succession of economic crises, the geographical expansion of their markets and the internationalisation of production. These tendencies lead from success to the gradual exhaustion of the potential to expand, especially for the production model and the dominant mode of regulation. Hence, even if crisis appears to be the outcome of unforeseen events or accidents, such as the increased price of oil in 1973 or the stock market crash of 1929, these only have a lasting and structural impact if the logic of the mode of regulation is itself destabilised and loses its coherence. The model of postwar Fordist growth was not immune to this rule, for its principles, the organisational forms they implied and the employment relations they generated proved increasingly counter-productive (Figure 2.1).

The very forces that made the old model so coherent impeded its simple and rapid restructuring into a system governed by different principles. Just because a model of management is in crisis does not mean that an alternative can be found that will miraculously resolve the problems of the first. Beyond the fact that each of the social groups and economic interests involved tends to defend its position within the old system, there are societal obstacles to the birth of new ideas that would presuppose different industrial relations and a different configuration of the education system,¹ not to mention a reorientation of forms of state intervention that had been quite functional to the Fordist growth model. The long path from recognising Fordism’s crisis to near consensus on the configuration of an alternative system clearly reveals the intrinsic difficulty of redesigning a production system. This problem is worsened in the case of Fordism by heavy infrastructural and other investment that created indivisibilities, i.e. the requirement for a minimum size of market and the complementarity between the various institutional forms closely associated with this one mode of development (monetary and international regimes, state intervention). This diagnosis is confirmed by a brief overview of the principal stages of the process by which it came to be recognised that the Fordist production model was indeed in crisis.

The emergence of a new production system presupposes mechanisms of coordination that go beyond the mere aggregation of independent, individual strategies, yet are not easily created by centralised public intervention. Intermediary mechanisms are more effective, since they are able to synchronise individual behaviours at play in otherwise disconnected spheres. In fact the dilemma of how to implement new principles threatens overly restrictive and antagonistic conceptions of the respective roles played by the market and the state.

It is certainly possible to emphasise the strong continuities that bind different production systems together. According to this view, flexible mass production could never be more than a deepening of the scientific organisation of work, the equivalent of the transition from Ford’s model ‘T’ to the annual model change instigated by General Motors (see Figure 6.1). This diagnosis of great continuity is reinforced in countries where nostalgia for Fordism is strong.

The twentieth century, particularly since 1945, has been dominated by the virtuous circle of Fordism, a system that joined mass production to mass consumption. It could be even better described as an upward spiral of capitalist accumulation supported by the welfare state, strong labour unionism and credit-based consumerism, each of which played its part in the virtuous circle linking production to consumption.¹ Two fundamental technologies underlay the economic apparatus: the automobile and electricity. The former structured space (the importance of individualism, the detached house, the extended suburbs and the second home, for instance), while the latter played two roles: it was a factor in productivity improvements and it gave rise to a multiplicity of mass-consumption products. From this perspective Fordism can be understood as a sociotechnical paradigm in which regulation of the mass-consumption/mass-production link was based on certain fundamental technologies used in both consumption and production, the latter associated with a particular form of work organisation (Figure 7.1). This virtuous circle had a sort of ‘accelerator’ effect that favoured the development of demand through trade union pressures (wage claims) as well as through the welfare state, with its indirect wages (health and education in particular).

Many authors believe that changes in production principles result from market transformations that are themselves due to changes in consumer behaviour. This hypothesis deserves further discussion. The issue is the cause of the increase in product variety that has occurred over the last two decades. Is this due to a change in consumer behaviour based on social class differentiation and the rise of individualism? Or is increased product variety due to exacerbated competition among producers that have sought increased customer satisfaction in order to increase their sales?

The case studies reported in the previous chapter reveal how the principles behind the emerging production paradigm are being implemented. However we have shown that while they are partially successful, social forces or socio-organisational constraints can restrict the coherence of the overarching principles. In this chapter we pursue this question further, to investigate the real structural depth of such changes (including their associated technologies), analysing some of the contradictions and constraints that seem to be integral to them.

Part I of this book claims that a new production paradigm may be emerging in Japan, Germany and Sweden. This claim can be tempered by showing that the characteristics of the German and Swedish ‘models’ in fact derive from local specificities, and they are particular versions of the same overall model, a model that is still very much alive.

The hypothesis here has been that some observers have too easily confused the end of the boom years, the crisis of capital accumulation and the emergence of new forms of production. To be sure, any attempt to escape from crisis creates new solutions to old problems, and can thus even displace or modify old issues. But is that sufficient grounds for believing the old order or old forms of organisation to have ruptured? To talk of rupture, we would need to talk of salaried employment being replaced by other forms of work, or that the methods of sharing the social surplus were being radically transformed, or perhaps that the division and organisation of work were not governed by the same, almost military, style of command.