Taylorism, Fordism, and Post-Fordism

For nearly a century, Taylorism and Fordism combined to construct the predominant rules of production and manufacturing employment in America. This formula created not only affordable products for the American market but also the consumer class that these products needed to be profitable. This article gives an overview of Taylorism, Fordism, and Post-Fordism. Each is presented in chronological order and contrasted with the preceding ideologies. The scientific approach of Taylor, Ford's division of labor, and the global marketplace of Post-Fordism appear to be enduring influences of these movements. An understanding of all three is essential in understanding the modern economy and the changes and ideologies that lie ahead.

Keywords Assembly Line; Contradictions of Capitalism; Mass Production; Piecemeal; Post-Industrialism; Scientific Management; Specialization; Vertical Engineering

Taylorism, Fordism, & Post-Fordism

Overview

In 1878, a young American engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) moved his apprenticeship to the Midvale steelworks on the industrial fringes of Philadelphia. The Midvale workers were paid piecemeal. Ideally, this meant that the more a worker produced, the more they got paid. In practice, this meant that each time a worker earned too much, in the eyes of the employer, the piecemeal rate would be cut for all workers (Donkin, 2001). The result was that workers began to harmonize their efforts to limit production and produce only enough to prevent further cuts and stay out of trouble. Taylor was amazed at the level of creativity, expertise, and labor that went into achieving this golden mean of un-productivity. At first he began to address the problems at Midvale in a traditional manner: he fired unproductive employees. When the new employees were equally unproductive, he cut the piecemeal rate. This only entrenched the Midvale workers deeper into the behaviors Taylor was attempting to break down. When Taylor turned to management for support, he found he could not convince them that his new ideas would work (Donkin, 2001).

If Taylor was going to change the behavior of the workforce, he had to better understand the work processes in order to sway management. With the approval of the owners, he began a series of scientific experiments in which he broke down the processes of the plant into smaller, simple tasks and used a stopwatch (the latest technology) to record the time necessary to perform each task in various ways. These experiments, though not the first of their kind, would become the basis of new work practices at Midvale, two books of scientific management, and the beginning of modern business management.

Henry Ford (1863–1947) was the founder of Ford Motor Company. His big idea was that work, previously conceived of as only a sustenance act, could be improved with technology to become the mechanism that set people free to live their own lives (Donkin, 2001; Ford & Crowther, 2005). At the core of this thinking was the idea that manufacturing should be efficient enough and workers paid enough that a worker could afford to purchase the products they produce. Ford believed a degree of prosperity should come from a worker’s "honest effort" (Ford & Crowther, 2005). How Ford developed the practice of mass production did make it possible for a Ford assembly line worker to purchase a Ford automobile. It also changed how products were produced, how workers were trained and worked, and how management functioned.

For nearly a century, Taylorism and Fordism combined to construct the predominant rules of production and manufacturing employment in America. Large companies used well-paid employees performing repetitive, fairly simple tasks on assembly lines to produce complex, though largely standard, products. This formula created not only affordable products for the American market but also the consumer class that these products needed to be profitable. American prosperity, previously isolated to the industrial barons of the late nineteenth century, was extended to more people than ever before, and the American middle class expanded rapidly.

Unfortunately, capitalism and the Taylorism/Fordism paradigm did have its shortcomings. As Marx predicted, capitalism has its periods of crisis. Some of these crises are recessions and depressions. The American Great Depression was devastating to manufacturers and workers. It really is not surprising that the Depression was followed by an era of regulation. American employers and workers wanted some assurance that such a total collapse would not happen again. Another crisis emerged when large manufacturing companies started to back-track on Ford's idea that workers should be paid well. The response to this crisis was the rise of the American worker's unions. Unions helped workers ensure a living wage and job stability. However, with the demise of unions in the late part of the twentieth century and the interchangeability of low-paid unskilled workers, the American economy faced another crisis, one of the contradictions of capitalism that Marx warned of. As companies cut back on workers' wages in order to make greater profits, workers became less capable of purchasing the products they produced. This meant the market for the goods being produced would shrink. The response to this crisis has been to globalize production. In this way, lower wages are moved to another consumer market, one in which the wages are relatively high.

In turn, America and other Western postindustrial countries have developed new service industries, including the enormous financial industry, to provide new jobs and strengthen the consumer pool. In a very real sense, this is just a way of deferring the contradiction of capitalism until a time when the rest of the world's labor markets mature. Today, regulation, the rise of globalism, and the rising service sector in Western economies are all part of a prevailing economic system known as Post-Fordism.

Applications

Taylorism

Taylorism, also called scientific management, was an approach to management that replaced management-worker conflict and low worker productivity with a scientific redesign of supervision and work. Taylorism was the beginning of the systematic study of work in industry. Taylor championed the role of the engineer, who could study processes by breaking them down into smaller tasks, observing them, and timing them, then reengineer work in order to develop the single best way to accomplish a task. Since the process was arrived at through a scientific approach, Taylor believed it would reduce friction between management and workers (Marshall, 1998). Taylor successfully implemented scientific management in a number of places. Perhaps his most famous successes came at Bethlehem Steel, where he reengineered the process for shoveling coal and loading steel. Not only did Taylor strive for better productivity, he also argued that workers should be given periodic rests in order to keep productivity high and that workers should be paid better (Donkin, 2001). Ultimately, Taylorism is direct control of production labor through incentive pay, controlled movements, time studies, and standard setting (Krier, 2006).

The basic elements of Taylorism are:

• Performing scientific analysis of tasks in order to develop a standard process and standard level of performance for each task

• Hiring and training the employee with the right abilities for the job

• Enabling workers to be successful by planning, training them, and providing them with the rests and tools needed to do their jobs

• Providing wage incentives for increased productivity

• Putting engineers in charge of the processes that managers supervise and workers perform

Standards

Standardization includes rules, job descriptions, chain of command, work processes, documentation of processes, and expected levels of production. Taylor believed that written documentation of each task helped created a "joint effort" between management and worker (Taylor, 1911). The written instructions also included time limits and incentive pay to be received when time goals were met. Taylor was careful to state that the time limits should not be unreasonable and that the instructions were only to prepare the worker to succeed so he or she could enjoy long, productive, and prosperous years of not being overworked. Taylor also was concerned about jobs being passed from one employee to another. He described how a "green employee" could come into a business and pick up the essentials of a new job with the guidance of management because of the history and memory that good work documentation supplied.

The practice of documentation has remained in place in business. In addition to enabling the standardization, productivity, and memory that Taylor envisioned, documentation also provides standards for treating employees fairly and a degree of legal protection.

Hiring the Right Worker for the Job

Taylor believed that scientific management provided an unequaled structure for training and supporting workers and for recognizing the performance of top workers. He believed that good managers matched their employees' abilities with the right jobs and that the continual measurement of performance allowed the best workers to rise to the top faster (Taylor, 1911). The idea of getting the right worker in the right job has been revived in Jim Collins's immensely popular book From Good to Great (2001). Collins adapted Taylor's ideas to incorporate an element that Taylor did not practice: given how difficult it is to find good employees, management should not simply fire a struggling employee but should instead see if moving that employee to a different job can spark a success.

Support Workers with Planning & Training

Taylor saw the role of job planning and training as management's support for the worker. Breaking down complex jobs into simple tasks, engineering those tasks, documenting their processes, and training the employees were all a part of Taylor's vision. This may be one of the areas where Taylor's critics disagree with him most. It can be argued that this support has stripped work of its more interesting elements and the repetitive nature of work has made it less safe.

Taylor also believed that in order to get more productivity, managers must give workers incentives "beyond that of the average of the trade" (Taylor, 1911). Further, he argued in The Principles of Scientific Management that management "is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles…and are applicable to all kinds of human activities" (1911). He considered this new science in the realm of engineers. Being a mechanical engineer himself, Taylor was painting a picture of businesses being run by engineers.

Fordism

Henry Ford had a number of failures before he hit upon the right formula at Ford Motor Company. His biggest challenge at Edison, Detroit Automobile Company, and Henry Ford Motor Company was how to produce an affordable automobile. It was not until he tried again at the Ford Motor Company that he found the prescription for success. Ford introduced new ideas that increased productivity and lowered the costs of manufacturing an automobile. To balance the innovations, Ford paid his employees a higher rate so that they could also afford to buy a new Ford automobile. Ford would later describe the revolutionary changes in manufacturing at Ford as substantiated by something quite elemental in every person: the desire for regularity and routine (Ford & Crowther, 2005). What Ford introduced at the Ford motor company was known as Fordism. The primary elements of Fordism are:

• Division of labor or specialization

• Parts standardization

• Organizing the sequence of production

• The moving assembly line

Specialization

Fordism continued the process, started by Taylorism, of breaking down complex jobs into smaller, simpler tasks. How Fordism differed from Taylorism was in the sequential organization of jobs and the integration of these new, deskilled tasks into the moving assembly line. Fordism created highly repetitive jobs in a fast-moving assembly line. Because the next job could not be performed until the previous job was completed, the pressure on workers to keep the line moving was intense.

Fordism extended the Taylorism concept of standardization to parts. By making all versions of a particular automobile part identical, the productivity of the assembly line remained high. Ford spun off new companies to build the standardized parts Ford Motor Company needed. Perhaps no other part of Fordism pays a higher tribute to Taylorism than the vertical engineering process employed by the Ford Motor Company.

Sequential Production

Ford organized production in a sequential order. Machines that had previously been grouped together to take advantage of central sources of electricity were moved into long assembly lines to increase the efficiency of the production process. With machines, parts, and workers ordered sequentially in the production process the time taken to move partially constructed automobiles and parts was reduced.

Fordism took the assembly line one step further. Ford utilized a linear moving assembly line. As an automobile moved through the line, workers and machines added standard parts at each station. Parts were delivered to the stations along the line, and workers took their turn adding each part in order.

Post-Fordism

Post-Fordism describes prevailing systems of economic production in the world today. Post-Fordism takes into consideration recent changes in the economies of Western postindustrial countries. Where Fordism assumed local manufacturing, local consumer markets, and a local economy based on manufacturing, Post-Fordism encompasses global supply chains, global markets, and Western economies based on service and financial industries. Post-Fordism also takes into consideration changes in consumerism brought on by the desire of consumers for greater product diversity and increased use of regulation by governments to protect national economies, businesses, communities, and workers.

The chief elements of Post-Fordism are:

• The rapid rise of information technologies

• Emphasis on consumer types instead of class

• Flexible manufacturing

• Global supply chain

• The rise of the service and financial sectors

• Feminization of the workplace

• Globalization

Information Technologies

The rise of information technologies has not only changed the way traditional companies do business, it has also given consumers more information about products. The global connectivity of computers has connected companies, workers, and consumers in new networks. Smaller companies can now compete with larger companies by reaching consumers that would have been too expensive to reach in the past. Workers can work in collaboration with others across geographical expanses and national borders. Technology makes it possible to manage decentralized and fragmented processes and has given rise to a new class of technology workers (Monahan, 2005). This type of work was once considered too expensive and untimely for companies. Consumers can now shop for products all over the world; no longer having to settle for standard products, they can use technology to find products that are unique and affordable.

Consumer Types

Post-Fordism moves marketing beyond class and into consumer types. Instead of simply marketing a product to an economic class of people who can afford the product, companies now focus on consumers' gender, age, values, interests, and buying habits. Car makers do not simply produce an expensive model and an inexpensive model; they produce cars for young consumers, for environmentally conscious consumers, for outdoorsy consumers, for consumers who want to express economic status, and for families with small children. The numbers and types of different consumers are constantly growing and evolving. Changes in the economy and trends in culture create new consumer types all the time. The ability of companies to adjust to these changes is critical to their success.

Flexible Manufacturing

In order to keep up with the ever-changing consumer types and their demands, companies must be able to be flexible. Flexible manufacturing, also called flexible specialization, is when companies build complex manufacturing processes that can produce diverse product lines targeted at different consumer types. The production processes must be able to change as consumer needs and desires change. Flexible manufacturing also means a flexible workforce. This may actually work better in Europe than America. In America, the idea of a flexible workforce is often associated with the prospect of a job with no access to disability or health care (Derber, 2000). Some scholars argue that the flexible organization model fails when applied to organizations that demand some autonomy and creativity to deliver their product or service (Brehony & Deem, 2005).

Global Supply Chain

In the place of the manufacturing assembly line, more and more companies are turning to global supply chains. A global supply chain is a network of producers, manufacturers, distributors, transporters, storage facilities, and suppliers that provides retailers with a product to sell. An example of the global supply chain is Dell, a major international computer maker. For each of the key parts in every computer they sell, Dell has multiple vendors that can make the part to their exact specifications. In order to ensure that local politics, economies, and natural disasters do not affect Dell's ability to deliver their product, the company has several vendors producing the same parts in different countries. Though a computer may be built at any one of Dell's manufacturing sites—usually the one closest to the customer—the parts are manufactured worldwide, and a single computer may contain parts from over twenty different countries.

Service & Financial Industries

One aspect of the modern economy not imagined by classical economists such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx is the rise of the service and financial sectors. Smith and Marx saw the core of a modern economy as anchored in manufacturing. Globalization has allowed countries and companies to outsource manufacturing to cheaper labor markets in foreign countries. In turn, local economies in prosperous postindustrial nations develop strong service sectors. In America, this includes financial institutions, health care, hospitality, and numerous other professional as well as unskilled service sectors. One of the fastest-growing service sectors over the last fifty years has been financial industries. The industry has seen impressive growth and profits by managing, selling, and often reselling banking, financing, credit, derivatives, and insurance.

Feminization of the Workplace

The growing number of women in the workplace has also influenced Post-Fordism because so many of the assumptions in Taylorism and Fordism relied on the ideal of the man as worker and sole provider for his family. The needs of women workers differ from those of their male counterparts, and the skill sets they bring to the workforce are often different as well. In America, the busting up of unions, the de-skilling of manufacturing jobs, and the outsourcing of entire industries, combined with the rise of management jobs in the service industry, which require greater communicative and social skills and less physical strength, has increased women's chances of obtaining jobs that pay a working-class or lower-middle-class wage. Additionally, the feminization of the human resource jobs and the hiring process has led to more women being hired in these industries (Fernandez & Mors, 2005).

Globalization

Globalization is the shift of business and culture from local communities to a multinational environment. Globalization has opened up new markets of consumers for businesses and new companies and products for consumers. Additionally, globalization has created new opportunities for companies to manufacture products in other countries that can supply high quality and relatively low-wage workers. The decentralization of manufacturing, flexible specialization in manufacturing, global workforces, and global markets are all aspects of Post-Fordism globalization (Gottfried, 1995).

Conclusion

Economies are constantly changing. Taylorism and Fordism were radically new ideas in their time, and elements of these ideologies remain influential in today's modern economies. Post-Fordism explains how modern economies have moved past the rigid, calculated methodologies of Taylorism and Fordism and adapted to the new global environment. These changes are not complete. What comes next will probably be something not completely imagined by today's economists. However, it is unlikely that it will be free from economic ideologies of the past. It is a good bet that elements of Taylorism, Fordism, and Post-Fordism will remain.

Terms & Concepts

Assembly Line: A manufacturing process where products are constructed in a sequential manner. The moving assembly line, developed by Henry Ford, takes the assembly line one step further by putting the products on a conveyor belt and pushing the assembly process to match the speed of the moving line.

Contradictions of Capitalism: The (at least) two inherent contradictions, as theorized by Karl Marx: that competition in a free market is undermined by the accumulation of wealth, which allows larger companies to gobble up smaller companies and effectively drive out competition; and that the goal of the capital class is to earn increasingly higher profits, which they can only do in the long run by driving down the wages of the working class. This ultimately impoverishes the working class and shrinks their ability to purchase the products they work to produce.

Piecemeal: A manner of paying workers for the number of units they produce instead of paying a salary or an hourly wage.

Post-Industrialism: An economic system that was once based on manufacturing but has since become a service-based economy.

Scientific Management: An approach to management that replaces management-worker conflict and low worker productivity with a scientific redesign of supervision and work. Scientific management studies work processes by breaking them down into smaller task, observing them, and timing them, then reengineering the work in order to design the single best method of accomplishing each task.

Specialization: A specific form of division of labor where workers are trained to perform specific repetitive tasks. By specializing in one area, a worker can be aligned with other specialists and increase productivity in the manufacturing process.

Vertical Engineering: A manufacturing process where a single company owns or controls the vendors that supply the parts for the manufacturing process.

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Suggested Reading

Amin, A. (1995). Post-Fordism: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Davidson, E. (2005). The assembly line. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Galloway, A. R. (2013). The poverty of philosophy: Realism and post-Fordism. Critical Inquiry, 39, 347–366. Retrieved November 1, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Complete.

Pruit, H. (1997). Job design and technology: Taylorism vs. Anti-Taylorism . New York: Routledge.