ABSTRACT
Within the wider debates over globalisation considered in Part I, issues of production play a particular role. Key features of production in a globalising context include the dispersal of industrial processes across international space; the growth and economic clout of multinational corporations; and the increasingly ‘immaterial’ character of production based on knowledge, information and communications technology. It is with these issues that the next two chapters are concerned, moving from the broader analysis of economic globalisation to focus more closely on the organisation of production and the nature of products within contemporary economic life. This chapter centres on accounts of the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism as systems of economic production and social reproduction. Theories of post-Fordism became prominent in the 1980s and after as attempts to explain processes of restructuring in advanced capitalist economies, particularly in light of the downturn of the early 1970s (see Kilmister 2000). The notion of Fordism, however, has much older antecedents. Taking its name from the US car manufacturer Henry Ford and the innovations he introduced in factory production early in the twentieth century, this mass industrial system received one of its sharpest critical treatments in the Prison Notebooks written in the early 1930s by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. It is Gramsci who gives us the precedent for thinking about Fordism not simply as a means of organising production and industrial work, but as an economic basis for the organisation of social life. This is an important move for the sociology of economic life, going beyond the study of production as a technical process to consider its integral place in a larger social formation. It suggests that the forms in which economies produce goods and services is closely tied to the ways in which they reproduce social relations, institutions and norms.
