Fordism and Post-Fordism

Fordism and post-Fordism are apparently complementary concepts that describe successive stages in economic development in the twentieth century. However, although Fordism has a positive content, post-Fordism has often signified nothing more substantial than an economic organization that follows Fordism. Recent work offers more substantive analyses of the successor regime(s) to Fordism and less reference is made to post-Fordism.

Fordism is widely used to describe (a) the system of mass production that was pioneered in the early twentieth century by the Ford Motor Company or (b) the typical postwar mode of economic growth and its associated political and social order in advanced capitalism. Henry Ford helped popularize the first meaning in the 1920s, and Fordism came to signify modernity in general. For example, writing in prison in the interwar period, the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, discussed the economic, political, and social obstacles to the transfer of Americanism and Fordism to continental Europe and highlighted its potential transformative power when controlled by workers rather than conservative forces. Gramsci's comments inspired research on postwar Fordism and its crisis. In its second meaning, Fordism has been analyzed along four dimensions. First, as an industrial paradigm, it involves mass production of standardized goods on a moving assembly line using dedicated machinery and semiskilled labor. Second, as a national accumulation (or growth) regime, it involves a virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption. Third, as a mode of regulation, Fordism comprises (a) an institutionalized compromise between organized labor and big business whereby workers accept management prerogatives in return for rising wages; (b) monopolistic competition between large firms based on cost-plus pricing and advertising; (c) centralized financial capital, deficit finance, and credit-based mass consumption; (d) state intervention to secure full employment and establish a welfare state; and (e) the embedding of national economies in a liberal international economic order. Fourth, as a form of social life, we find mass consumption, mass media, mass transport, and mass politics in a mass society.

The Fordist mode of growth became dominant in advanced capitalism during postwar reconstruction and is often credited with facilitating the long postwar boom. During the 1970s, however, its underlying crisis-tendencies became more evident. The growth potential of mass production was gradually exhausted, and there was intensified working-class resistance to its alienating working conditions; the market for mass consumer durables became saturated; a declining profit rate coincided with stagflation; a fiscal crisis developed; internationalization made state economic management less effective; clients began to reject [Page 315]standardized, bureaucratic treatment in the welfare state; and American economic dominance and political hegemony were threatened by European and East Asian expansion. These phenomena prompted a wide-ranging search for solutions to the crisis of Fordism, either by restoring its typical growth dynamics to produce a neo-Fordist regime or by developing a new post-Fordist accumulation regime and mode of regulation.

Post-Fordism is used both to describe a relatively durable form of economic organization that happened to emerge after Fordism or a new form of economic organization that actually resolves the crisistendencies of Fordism. In neither case does the term as such have any real positive content. This is why some theorists propose substantive alternatives such as Toyotism, Fujitsuism, Sonyism, and Gatesism or, again, informational capitalism, the knowledge-based economy, and the network economy. Social scientists have adopted three main approaches to identifying the post-Fordist regime: (a) focus on the transformative role of new technologies and practices regarding material and immaterial production—especially new information and communication technologies and their role in facilitating a new, more flexible, networked global economy; (b) focus on the leading economic sectors that enable a transition from mass industrial production to postindustrial production; and (c) focus on how major crisis-tendencies of Fordism are resolved through the consolidation of a new and stable series of economic and extra-economic institutions and forms of governance that facilitate the rise and consolidation of profitable new processes, products, and markets. However, even thirty years after the crisis of Fordism emerged in the mid-1970s, debates continue about whether a stable post-Fordist order has emerged and, indeed, whether Fordist stability was a parenthesis in an otherwise disorderly, crisis-prone capitalist system.

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