Fordism

Although the term Fordism refers to a form of industrial production and organization that originated in the American auto industry in the 1920s, it has come to have global significance in referring to a phase of capitalism characterized by the centrality of bureaucratized firms, interventionist states, national unions, and the need to coordinate mass production and mass consumption. The concept of Fordism was employed widely in later 20th-century debates over state and corporate restructuring in response to much increased global economic competition and resurgent laissez-faire policies, later associated with neoliberal globalization. The Fordist phase peaked in the post-World War II era, became crisis ridden in the 1970s, and, [Page 582]by the early 1990s, was displaced by the triumph of globalization and the neoliberal policy regime.

The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci coined the term Fordism in Mussolini's prison during the 1920s. He saw Henry Ford's innovations in industrial production and organization to typify a wider, fundamental capitalist restructuring that broke with classical liberalism, expanded earlier progressive era state-interventionism, and began a new age of guided capitalism. Gramsci argued presciently that Fordism provided an alternative to economic individualism and laissez-faire policies, which lacked adequate means of control and regulation to tame worker resistance and harmonize production and consumption. Paralleling American institutionalist economists, Gramsci recognized the important role of political and social institutions and culture in facilitating the capitalist system's stability and accumulative capacities. His concept of Fordism was redeployed in the late 1970s and 1980s by primarily European and American thinkers, who also recognized the importance of institutional and cultural factors in perpetuating capitalism's vitality.

Under Fordism, assembly line production, electrification, and other technical changes made science, technology, and research/development much more central to the industrial system. The new regime was also characterized by bureaucratically organized, vertically integrated corporate firms, which employed vastly increased numbers of professional and technical personnel. These university-trained specialists developed and applied ever more comprehensive techniques of rational calculation and methods of economic and social planning. Fordism's “Taylorized” labor management strategies imposed discipline from above through new methods of technical control designed by managers and engineers. Via radio and other means of mass entertainment and communication, marketing specialists sought to manage mass consumption, harmonize it with mass production, and deflect class conflict between deskilled factory operatives and the expanded professional middle class. The American vision of “consumer democracy,” in its incipient stage in early Fordism, was stalled by the Great Depression and came to fruition only after World War II. However, high unemployment levels, unmet needs, and worker unrest generated political forces that increased the regulatory and social arms of the state. A harbinger of postwar welfare/regulatory states, the American New Deal and massive wartime expansion of government intervention and spending affirmed Keynesianism and undermined laissez-faire ideology, which had prevailed in the 1920s.

In the postwar era, a major expansion of higher education; more diverse, highly complex organizational forms; and elaborate job ladders produced a much more segmented labor force. Fordism coordinated mass production and mass consumption, generated steady accumulation, enhanced democratic legitimacy, produced unparalleled economic growth and abundance, and forged a consumer culture. The “capital-labor accord” ceded to management ultimate control over the labor process and production, but organized labor was granted collective-bargaining power to negotiate salary, benefits, and work conditions. Consequently, many workers shared substantially in productivity gains and enjoyed much increased benefits. Participating actively in politics, unions helped shape policy making, planning, and labor legislation. The Fordist state employed Keynesian policies of advanced fiscal controls, broader socioeconomic regulation, and expanded health, education, and welfare benefits. The middle class grew enormously, and many people attained the standard consumer package and sharply improved living conditions. Postwar Fordism enhanced inclusion of many formerly marginalized people, raised the social wage, and advanced equal opportunity and equality of condition, especially in social democracies. However, the American middle class and overall class system was complexly and steeply stratified. The lowest strata benefited little, and sharp inequalities between dominant and subordinate races, ethnic groups, and genders, production workers and professionals, nonunion workers and unionized workers manifested the era's political compromises and pattern of bureaucratization. Inequalities of this sort existed to some degree in all Fordist regimes. Moreover, at Fordism's economic high tide, critics from both the political left and the political right attacked the regime for its alienating, depoliticizing, regimenting, homogenizing impacts.

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