Post-Fordist Economy

Conceptual Overview

1n 1984, in their highly influential text, The Second Industrial Divide, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel proclaimed the end of the Fordist, mass production era and the rise of a new era of flexible specialization. The transition was characterized by a move from a dominant economic paradigm based on standardized products, dedicated equipment, and unskilled workers to one based on rapidly changing, specialized or variable products, flexible reprogrammable equipment, and [Page 1279]flexible multiskilled workers. Their positing of the rise of a new type of international economy drew strongly on the experience in the 1980s of the global rise to dominance of flexible mass production among large Japanese manufacturing firms in the 1980s, particularly in electronics and the automobile sector, and the experience of the competitive success of networks of small firms, best exemplified in the “Third Italy” phenomenon in the Emilia-Romagna district in northern Italy.

Speculation on the rise of a post-Fordist economy also came from a number of different sources throughout the 1980s. These included the neo-Marxist French Regulation School, which provided a broad institutional definition of the term, incorporating systems of consumption and international state regulation; the neo-Schumpeterian work on long-wave theory by economists of innovation, and the exploration of “new production concepts” in German industrial sociology; and the work of Harvard University academics on the need for a strategic U.S. manufacturing response to Japanese competition. Debates soon began to occur about the degree to which a radical change was actually occurring, whether the “old” economy had ever been as dominated by mass production as was suggested by the Fordist stereotype, and whether the transition was as uniform as was being suggested. In addition, considerable controversy was generated over the degree to which the new flexible world of work was a liberatory, empowered, and upskilled post-Fordist utopia, a new form of work intensification incorporating insidious and divisive forms of disciplinary microcontrol, or a potential for change that could take different, more-or-less palatable forms.

As noted in the introduction, considerable confusion marked this debate concerning whether claims were being made about the whole economy or substantial or leading sectors; whether paradigm changes referred to actual changes in production or strategy, or merely visions of efficient production; whether product standardization and mass production principles were being replaced or merely reapplied in a different form; and more discriminating analyses were provided of variations in the degree to which product standardization, production variability, and labor responsibility were only loosely coupled and configured differently in different economic, social, and political contexts. The idea that different industry sectors and national economies may be characterized by alternative sociotechnical trajectories emphasized in the 1980s by, among others, the societal effects school. The idea that there could be alternative paths of development characterized by different forms of labor microregulation was also a theme of the French Regulation School and has recently been taken up by others to inform debate over different patterns of evolution in industrial relations.

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