Second Industrial Divide, The

Written by Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel at a time of economic crisis, The Second Industrial Divide was first published in 1984 in New York by Basic Books. Translated into several languages between the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, this book lies at the intersection of several disciplines and represents a major milestone in the long road of reflection and critical review of the industrial economy and business history that unfolded throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The book’s starting point is an idea that was anything but trivial at the time: The crisis resulted from features that were intrinsic to the industrial model of mass production—that is, a manufacturing process for standard products built by highly specialized machinery and semiskilled workers. The ...