ABSTRACT
There has been growing recognition of the changing character of work in the advanced capitalist countries (Beynon, 1995), and of the decline of industrial employment there as it expands in newly industrializing countries (Dicken, 1992a). These changes in the volume, character and spatial distribution of employment are one facet of profound changes in the character of contemporary capitalism, manifestations of ‘the crisis of Fordism’ and the search for post-Fordist successors to it. This is the case both at the micro-level of a particular form of organizing production within the workplace and at the macro-level of a model of societal, political and economic development. The meaning and status of the changes continue to be hotly debated. Broadly speaking, there are competing alternative interpretations, with different implications for labour and the spatial organization of the economy. For some, a shift of epochal significance has occurred. Fordism’s successor is already known, although the terminology used to describe it varies. One implication of this is that the mass collective worker, characteristic of the big urban factories of Fordism, is a thing of the past, disempowered in and by the new economy of decentralized small flexible firms (Murray, 1983). Others contest this, arguing that the death of Fordism may have been prematurely announced, based on a partial reading of the evidence. Seen from this perspective, large-scale production in big factories is far from being a thing of the past. The search for Fordism’s putative successor(s) remains an ongoing process and may or may not represent some epochal shift. Claims to the contrary are premature and potentially damaging, theoretically and politically. The shape of the future remains to be determined but its developmental trajectory will be more complex than a neat, clean break from a Fordist past to a post-Fordist future. This is so for two different sorts of reasons. First, even at the high point of Fordism as a macro-scale development model, only a minority of labour processes were organized on Fordist lines (Poliert, 1988). ‘Fordism’ was constituted as an uneven mosaic of places, production and labour processes. Secondly, as Fordism reached its limits in the core countries of capitalism, companies began to search elsewhere for locations in which Fordist production would remain economically viable. This intersected with the desires of governments in peripheral countries (initially those which became characterized as the first generation of NICs and more latterly others such as China) to promote industrialization as the route to development. The crisis of Fordist production in the core of advanced capitalism thus became the proximate cause of changes in its location. It continues, but nowadays in new locations in the peripheries of the global economy. Consequently, the mass collective worker has not necessarily simply become a subject of history.
