Post-Fordism: Management & the Modern Enterprise
Post-Fordism: Management and the Modern Enterprise
Companies active in the new, post-Fordist, economy have often broken away from the traditional corporate model. If you want to make significant profits today, you must be prepared to be very flexible in your investments and production. Instead of tying up investments in factories or one type of business, companies diversify into multiple types of business and roll their investments around from one sphere to another as it makes sense. Several key companies are basing their prosperity not on the making of things, but on developing and marketing them. This is what Marxists are calling flexible accumulation.
The Decline of Fordism
On the downside, much of the old-line Fordist manufacturing was shifted to the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs), and what little remained tended to abandon the old-line Fordist regime. Instead of blue-collar jobs with the company for life, you have flexible time, contract work, layoffs, and wage rollbacks. The Fordist welfare state and those big government programs like highway construction, welfare, public schools, etc., have been defunded and reduced in scope and scale. Much has been privatized.
The Post-Fordist Workforce
In the post-Fordist “New Economy,” semi-skilled blue-collar males are not in high demand. The new post-Fordist economy needs people with social and technical skills. Women seem to be able to deliver on the social skills, and technically qualified men and women flourish in the new economy (when it needs them), but nobody now expects to have jobs for life.
From Mass Production to Flexible Specialization
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 a job, you must work at a speed dictated by computers, and you are competing, wage-wise, with other desperate people in low-wage countries. Instead of mass production of standard goods, firms now find it more profitable to produce distinct product lines targeted at different groups of consumers. In place of investing in the mass production of a single product, they now build flexible systems of labor and production to respond quickly to specific market demands.
The Role of Cities
This has had profound impacts on how production is geographically organized. Cities have an essential role in the increasing flows of goods, people, and ideas around the world. Cities can be part of the world system as producers of global goods and services, but also as marketplaces for the same global goods and services and as hubs in the flows of people, capital, and ideas.
Criticisms of the Post-Fordist Model
Critics argue that flexible specialization is not happening on any great scale, and smaller firms have always existed alongside mass production. Some critics believe that post-Fordism does exist, but coexists with Fordism. The automobile industry has combined Fordist and post-Fordist strategies using both mass production and flexible specialization.
The Pull System and Just-in-Time
Post-Fordism uses what we today call a Pull system, which has an opposite principle as it is a system that responds to a firm order generated by the customer. Thus, the impulse is given from the market, hence “pulling” the desired product from the manufacturer towards him, an inverse mechanism of offer and demand to that brought forth by Fordism. The pull system came with a new supply philosophy, that of Just-in-Time, which matched its mechanism and would only deliver materials if they were needed, thus preventing overproduction and inventory.