Fordism

The term Fordism was originally invoked by early-20th-century trade union activists to describe the [Page 1149]brutal system of machine-paced production methods deployed in automobile plants owned by Henry Ford. Ford's method radically transformed the conditions and rhythm of work on the shop floor. In the 1930s, Fordism was used by the Italian Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci to denote the peculiarly American form of modern production prefiguring a new stage of industrial capitalism. For late-20th-century social theorists, the system of production at Ford Motor Company in Michigan, first at the Highland Park plant in the 1910s and then at the massive River Rouge factory beginning in the late 1920s, was often used as the exemplary case of classic Fordism.

A hallmark of classic Fordist production is that large numbers of semiskilled and unskilled workers perform routine standardized tasks arranged sequentially to facilitate the steady and rapid flow of materials from one station to the next. In the Fordist system of mass production, the high volume of output allows the company to spread the cost of expensive, single-purpose capital equipment over a large number of outputs, thereby exploiting economies of scale in the production of consumer goods. This production process contrasted with the small-batch method, in which skilled craft workers would use mostly hand tools to fabricate parts and assemble the product in discrete stages. Machine pacing allowed managers to “speed up” the production process by increasing the pace at which the conveyor moved work through the plant. One of the key characteristics of classic Fordism is the extensive use of mass production techniques that shift control over the pace of work from craft workers to machines and managers. As such, Fordism has come to be seen as the antithesis of craft-based, multiskilled, team-supervised production processes.

Mass production facilities were not only labor intensive, they were land intensive as well. So the central city was no longer a viable site for manufacturing because it could not accommodate the spatial requirements of mass production. The mass production factory layout required a horizontal floor plan to promote the efficient movement of parts and subassembly processes. This technological factor compelled firms to locate outside the central city. In addition, resistance to unionization and fear of spreading strike activity motivated owners to begin to spatially isolate their massive production facilities. In the auto industry of the late 20th century, a similar set of considerations underlie the construction of “greenfield” facilities by Toyota, Honda, and BMW in Alabama, Southern Ohio, and South Carolina.

The spatial logic of Fordist production relied on the dual requirements of ready access to unskilled and semiskilled labor and relatively inexpensive land. For example, the River Rouge plant, built in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, was a sprawling facility that internalized the chain of commodity production by fabricating parts on site. In addition, Ford owned copper mines in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and a rubber plantation in Brazil. So another signal feature of Fordist production is centralized production and direct control of resources. However, the situation at Ford Motor was more complicated than this. At the same time when the Rouge plant was in operation, Ford experimented with the production of decentralized parts under varying technological and social conditions ranging from highly skilled unsupervised work teams to unskilled small-scale versions of mass production and hybrid operations combining aspects of mass production with craft practices. This strategy suggests that classic Fordism was at best partial and incomplete even at Ford Motor and implies that the concept of Fordism serves as an ideal type.

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