scholarly journals Fordismus: Glanz und Elend eines Produktionsmodells

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (172) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Ford Motor Company ◽  
Production Model ◽  
Assembly Lines ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Common View ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
The Us ◽  
Henry Ford

In the last decades, the concept of fordism has grown in popularity especially among left social scientists. Its aim is to explain certain historical forms of capitalism, notably the period of growing affluence of the working class which started in the 1930s in the US and in the 1950s in Western Europe, which is seen as a new connection of mass production and mass consumption, framed by an interventionist type of political regulation. As the term suggests, the origin of the model is attributed to Henry Ford and his innovation of the assembly line in the Ford Motor Company before 1914. Against this common view, it is argued that the success of Fords production model was limited, and that the later rising prosperity of workers in different countries is not to be explained by the dissemination of assembly lines, but by different types of rationalization and the ability of a then strong working class to enforce its demands of sharing the productivity gains by shorter working time and higher wages.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-218
Author(s):  
Stefan J. Link
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Society ◽  
High Mass ◽  
Information Economy ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Henry Ford ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Post Industrial

This concluding chapter explains that American-style postwar “Fordism” was only one pattern in the mottled global legacy left behind by Henry Ford. It was not the least ideological effect of American hegemony that in the 1960s modernization theory could universalize this unique historical arrangement — what can be called “high mass-consumption” — as the target of successful development itself. Responding to the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, social scientists added a next phase: “Post-Fordism” or “post-industrial society” signaled deindustrialization to some and the promise of a “service and information economy” to others. What united these constructs was a thinking in sequential stages, a preoccupation with national patterns of development, and a theory of causation centered on self-generating forces. It has become clear that cycles of industrialization and deindustrialization are inseparable from concerted efforts to restructure the global division of labor, that productive dual-use technologies are fiercely contested by states and corporations alike, that investment and disinvestment cannot be dislodged from contests over the terms of globalization, and that capital has no autonomous power outside of the designs and struggles of political actors.

We Do Not Prefer Cripples, but They Can Earn Full Wages

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah F. Rose
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Ford Motor Company ◽  
Injured Workers ◽  
Informal Labor ◽  
Henry Ford ◽  
Informal Labor Market ◽  
Almost All

Chapter 4 opens by investigating the ways in which working-class communities and workers had traditionally understood disability: as an anticipated, if feared, outcome of working life, but not as a cause for stigma. While bodily modifications such as missing fingers, crushed limbs, blinded eyes, or weakened lungs often brought a loss of skill and income, injured workers continued to work, often in the informal labor market. Mechanization and the drive for efficiency, however, provided employers with new notions of what made a good worker. With the striking exception of the Ford Motor Company, almost all major industrial employers began to believe that a modern, mechanized, and efficient workplace required employees with intact, interchangeable bodies. Henry Ford, however, demonstrated that, if carefully handled, mechanization could actually expand the range of employable bodies.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Stefan J. Link
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Assembly Lines ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Third Way ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
Henry Ford

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Fordism. Fordism, in its most common usage, was a term that first originated in the 1970s and then boomed in the 1980s, when social scientists sought ways to theorize the structural crises of the industrialized West. Henry Ford in fact never used the term — his global admirers created it. Fordism enjoys a second popular usage: as a shorthand for a distinctively American modernity that is said to have spread across the world in the twentieth century, in a process that historians of Europe have called “Americanization.” Finally, Fordism is used in a third way that focuses more narrowly on what goes on inside firms and on shop floors. To labor historians, Fordism means the shop regime associated with mass production: a focus on unskilled laborers working monotonous tasks on assembly lines. The chapter then details how the spread of Fordism during the interwar years arose from an antagonistic development competition that was initially triggered by the rise of the United States and then accelerated by the Great Depression. It looks at how Detroit became the destination of engineering delegations bent on wholesale technology transfer.

Searching for new Sources of growth. Are the Developing Countries Catching up with the Developed ones?

2015 ◽  
pp. 30-53
Author(s):  
V. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Gdp Per Capita ◽  
The West ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Divergence ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Relative Standing

This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western nation, was nearly 5 times higher than the world average and 2 times higher than in Western Europe. Since 1950 this ratio stabilized - not only Western Europe and Japan improved their relative standing in per capita income versus the US, but also East Asia, South Asia and some developing countries in other regions started to bridge the gap with the West. After nearly half of the millennium of growing economic divergence, the world seems to have entered the era of convergence. The factors behind these trends are analyzed; implications for the future and possible scenarios are considered.

Religion and Religiosity in the US

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Social Inequality ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

Although the countries of Western Europe are very similar to the US in terms of their social, political, and economic conditions, they differ greatly when it comes to religion. Chapter 10 discusses how these differences can be explained. The empirical analysis shows that, besides the considerable differences in the level of religiosity between the US and Western Europe, there are also surprising similarities in the weakening church ties and religious practices. The findings demonstrate that it is in many respects not Europe but America that is the exception. This relates among other things to the level of social inequality, which is unusually high for a modern society, the strong tendencies towards functional dedifferentiation, such as between religion and politics, and the traditionalism of the culturally accepted system of values.

Denaturalizing the Monroe Doctrine: The rise of Latin American legal anti-imperialism in the face of the modern US and hemispheric redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-555
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Scarfi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Elastic Behaviour ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Monroe Doctrine ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pan Americanism

AbstractThe Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a US foreign policy principle, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the interventionist policies of the US in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians and social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideologies, there was a distinct legal tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been overlooked by international law scholars and the scholarship focusing on Latin America. In recent years, a new revisionist body of research has emerged exploring the complicity between the history of modern international law and imperialism, as well as Third World perspectives on international law, but this scholarship has begun only recently to explore legal anti-imperialist contributions and their legacy. The purpose of this article is to trace the rise of this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition, assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine and its implications for current debates about US exceptionalism and elastic behaviour in international law and organizations, especially since 2001.

Organizing Working-Class Academics: A Collective History

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-178
Author(s):  
Allison Hurst ◽  
Tery Griffin ◽  
Alfred Vitale
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
College Students ◽  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Us ◽  
Working Class Studies ◽  
Key Questions

In 2008, the Association of Working-Class Academics was founded in upstate New York by three former members of the Working-Class/Poverty-Class Academics Listserv. The Association had three goals: advocate for WCAs, build organizations on campuses that would support both working-class college students and WCAs, and support scholarship on issues relevant to class and higher education. The Association grew from a small handful to more than 200 members located in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Germany. In 2015, it was formally merged with the Working-Class Studies Association, and continues there as a special section for WCSA members. This is our collective account of the organization, told through responses to four key questions. We hope this history will provide insight and lessons for anyone interested in building similar organizations.

Chapter II. The World Economy

1983 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
pp. 26-38
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Industrial Production ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The Uk ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Minor Extent

The recovery in the OECD area gathered pace in the second quarter, when its total GDP probably increased by as much as 1 per cent. The rise was, however, heavily concentrated in North America and particularly the US. There may well have been a slight fall in Western Europe, where the level of industrial production hardly changed and increases in gross product in West Germany and, to a minor extent, in France were outweighed by falls in Italy and (according to the expenditure measure) the UK.

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