Fordism

Fordism is the industrial engineering and manufacturing system, named after Henry Ford, that underpins standardized mass production paired with mass consumption. Its working idea is that a manufacturer can make standardized, low-cost goods in huge volumes with special-purpose machinery and workers who need little prior skill, and still pay those workers enough to buy the products. Three principles are usually named: standardization of the product, assembly lines that let common-skilled workers each contribute to the finished item, and higher living wages. Ford did not invent the assembly line, which slaughterhouses had already used, but he broke complex tasks into simpler ones with specialised tools so that parts became interchangeable. The term gained prominence through Antonio Gramsci in 1934 in his essay on Americanism and Fordism, and it is now also used in social, economic and management theory about production, working conditions and consumption in the twentieth century. Bob Jessop describes four levels of Fordism, from the labour process to the societal mode of regulation.