ABSTRACT
From the 1920s down to the 1960s, across the advanced capitalist world, many leading industrial sectors were converted to mass production methods. Over this same period, various institutions and practices were constructed to regulate the social and economic effects of mass production. These regulatory apparatuses consisted of rather similar basic elements throughout the advanced capitalist world. One such element was the strongly oligopolistic structure of industry, with its large-scale markets and rising barriers to entry. Labor relations and labor markets were everywhere ordered by institutions of collective bargaining, with a strong functional split between white-collar workers (responsible for industrial planning) and blue-collar workers (responsible for routine manual labor). Keynesian welfare-statist legislation helped to smooth out aggregate demand and to secure high levels of social stability. In regional terms, this form of industrialization was seen by theorists of the day as a system of core-periphery relationships, within which core regions tended to grow at the expense of underdeveloped peripheral regions which in turn provided raw materials or agricultural products for the core at unfavorable terms of trade.
