Conclusion: From Fordism to Neo-Fordism?

Abstract

In this book we try to show and investigate seven things:

• 1. We demonstrate how technological developments of the past hundred years can be seen as a progression of overlapping phases of primary, secondary and tertiary mechanisation, exemplified in particular leading industrial sectors; those developments seen within certain work organisational contexts, in labour processes, can be shown to link with long waves in capitalist economic growth.

• 2. We argue that the technological basis of the post-World War Two boom period of the fourth long wave can be seen as the generalisation of secondary mechanisation with the emergence, in a small number of industries, of tertiary mechanisation.

• 3. We identify Fordism as the dominant labour/production process paradigm of the boom period of the fourth long wave.

• 4. We see the depression of the 1980s as one of a crisis of a specific form of capital accumulation, based on particular Fordist production methods, products and consumption patterns which came from and led developed economies out of the depression of the 1930s.