Abstract
It is certainly possible to emphasise the strong continuities that bind different production systems together. According to this view, flexible mass production could never be more than a deepening of the scientific organisation of work, the equivalent of the transition from Ford’s model ‘T’ to the annual model change instigated by General Motors (see Figure 6.1). This diagnosis of great continuity is reinforced in countries where nostalgia for Fordism is strong.
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Notes and References
This view parallels the analyses of P. Veltz ‘Déstabilisation et résistance du taylourisme’ in J. P. Durand (ed.), Vers un nouveau modèle productif? (Paris: Syros, 1993), who also insists on the trial and error — therefore long — process by which a new production model emerges.
The example of France is illuminating: see Robert Boyer, ‘Educational push and/or wage austerity: the French Dilemma’, Labour, September 1995.
Robert Boyer, ‘La spécificité de l’industrialisation française en quête de théories: essor et crise d’une variante étatique du modèle fordiste (1945–1995), forthcoming in Louis Bergeron and Patrice Bourdelais (eds), La France n’est-elle pas douée pour l’industrie? (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1996).
Robert Boyer, Elsie Charron, Ulrich Jürgens and Stephen Tolliday, Transfer and Hybridization of Productive Models. Manuscript, 1996.
This strategy is related to the kind of tinkering process discussed in modern biology: see F. Jacob, Le jeu des possibles: essai sur la diversité du vivant (Paris: Fayard, 1981), as well as to anthropology following
C. Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). As far as production systems are concerned, this perspective emphasises a diversity of configurations, in particular according to sector, all of which respond to the demands of flexibility; see
A. Hatchuel and J. C. Sardas, ‘Les nouvelles rationalisations de la production’, in Les nouvelles rationalisations de la production (Paris: Ecole des Mines, 1992).
One only has to compare the analyses of Toyota by M. Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) and
S. Shingo, Maîtrise de la production et méthode kanhan: le cas toyota (Paris: les Éditions d’Organisation, 1983), with the theorisation offered by T. Ohno, op. cit.
Tetsuo Abo (ed.), Hybrid Factory: The Japanese Production System in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
It is clear that Asian systems are far from being simple copies of Japanese methods: see Richard Whitley, Business Systems in East Asia: Firms, Markets and Societies (London: Sage, 1992), or
Stephen Frekel and Jeffrey Harrod, Industrialization and Labor Relations (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1995).
Robert Boyer and Michel Freyssenet ‘The World that Changed the Machine’, mimeograph (Paris: GERPISA 1996).
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© 1993 Robert Boyer and Jean-Pierre Durand
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Boyer, R., Durand, JP. (1993). Toyotaism and Uddevallaism are not the End of History!. In: After Fordism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14027-5_6
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