The 1990s: The New Production Paradigm

For Keynes, in his A General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), the obstacles that confronted new concepts derived not from their intrinsic difficulty but from the power of the old interpretive systems. This adage is particularly applicable to the production system: Fordist principles had been so efficient that it was necessary for failures to be repeated, and for differences between companies, regions and nations to widen, if an overall vision of the principles that would govern future production systems was to be created (Figure 4.1).