Our society has been changing all the time, bases on the fundamental innovations occurred at workplaces. Since 1970s, the UK society has been undergoing significant changes in many aspects, moving forward from a traditional industrialized society. As an important part of this process, methods of organizing production are also changing considerably. From a Fordist society to a post-Fordist society, our society has operated towards more scientific and flexible production regimes. This essay is hearted on assessing both types of production regimes and compares their differences.

Fordist society started in early 20th century. Fordism is named after its pioneer, the car maker Henry Ford. It is an “industrial system involved the mass production of standardized goods by huge, integrated companies. Each company was composed of many different, specialized departments each producing components and parts that were eventually channelled towards the moving line for final assembly.” (Cohen & Kennedy, 2000, p62) The term Fordism, is coined by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, writing in his prison notebooks on Americanism and Fordism in the early 1930s. (Kirby, 1997, p340)

There are inseparable linkages between Fordism and scientific management, or so-called Taylorism. Fordism is considered as an extension of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. In 18th century, Adam Smith, one of the founders of modern economics, identified advantages of division of labour in term of increasing productivity. More than a century later, Frederick Taylor, an American management consultant, further developed on this idea and applied it to management sciences. “Taylor’s approach to what he called scientific management involved the detailed study of industrial processes in order to break them down into simple operations that could be precisely timed and organized.” (Giddens, 2001, p383) Taylorism had a widespread impact on the organization of industrial production and technology. Taylor focused on improving industrial efficiency, but not emphasizing enough on the results came out of it. Mass production needs mass market, and Henry Ford was the first to see this linkage and apply into real practice.

In 1908, Mr. Ford designed his car manufacturing plant at Highland Park, Detroit, to produce the “famous single-colour, single-model, mass-produced Model T” Ford. Although the idea of assembly-line production was not new, but it was Mr. Ford first employed the principle of semi-automatic moving assembly line. The work of making a Model T had divided into 7,882 minor operations involved, however, within them, only about one eighth of these operations required “strong, able bodied and practically physically perfect men”, about half of these operations needed men of “merely ordinary physical strength”, the rest operations can be done by women and children, and even disabled workers such as legless, one legged, armless, one armed, and also blind workers. Every worker preformed one simple and repeated task. By applying this strategy, the productivity had increased massively. A Model T Ford car could be manufactured and tested in one and a half hours in the new plant, which initially required twelve and a half hours. (Maltby & Kirby, 1996, p50)

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Although productivity could be increased largely under Fordism, there were still significant downsides related to it, which led to crisis of Fordism in 1970s. Firstly, it was because during that time, “the economic stability it required was undermined, but secondly because consumers were no longer happy to put up with the mass-produced range of goods Fordism offered and were looking for more choices.” (Kirby, 1997, p340) The joke ‘You can have any color (Model-T) you like, as long as it is black’ given by Henry Ford himself proved such weakness to some extents. In addition, from the prospective of ...

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