Post-Fordism

The term Fordism derives from the methods of success of the Ford Motor Company in respect of the mass production and selling of its Model T car in the early decades of the 1900s and is typically understood to originate in the work ethic and labor [Page 1118]organization that was first seen in the car assembly lines. Fordism became the model for mass production—an organizational strategy to meet emergent mass consumerism and the democratization of consumer society that accompanied the emergence of a newly enriched working class. The ideas of Fordist production and consumer culture in the last century are inseparable.

On a microlevel, the worker placed at the conveyor belt and repeatedly engaging in the same activity or drawing on the same area of expertise ...