Fordism: a review essay

ABSTRACT

Fordism is a central concept in American labour history. This essay, the first survey of the range of historiographical and sociological approaches deployed to understand Fordism, suggests that Fordism and Americanism are inseparably intertwined. Previous scholarship has emphasised that the technological and managerial efficiency of Fordist practice were a hallmark of twentieth-century Americanism. Historians of labour have demonstrated that these aspects manifested as a relentless system of control in the workplace that paradoxically helped to unify worker resistance. Historians of capitalism have tended to used Fordism to refer to an ethos underpinning mid-twentieth-century capitalist development marked by a balance between mass production and mass consumption. They identify increased social provisions and class compromise between labour and management as features that made Fordism attractive to states rebuilding their economies following the Second World War. New transnational histories of Fordism have begun to bridge the gap between these two main interpretations to show how Fordist practice and ethos were exported together internationally as part of an ideological project to modernise nations in America’s image. This essay concludes by assessing the usefulness of Fordism to historians and suggesting avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Fordism
• historiography
• mass production
• capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a detailed examination of the Fordist production processes and technologies, the success of Ford automobiles and the development of the twentieth-century automobile market, see Rae (1984) and Rubenstein (2001).

2. This discussion of literature on Henry Ford deliberately omits the more polemical literature on Ford authored during his lifetime, such as Upton Sinclair’s The Flivver King (1937) written at the time of the Congress of Industrial Organization’s organising drive.

3. For works discussing Taylorism and its effects on workplace organisation, see Montgomery (1979) and Nelson (1995).

4. For works on modernisation theory and strategy as it relates to Americanism, see Adas (2006) and Ekbladh (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Watson

Daniel Watson is an American Studies PhD student at the University of Nottingham. His research examines how American organised labour intervened in debates over industrial automation during the Cold War.