Neoliberalism Vs Post Fordism

Introduction

Fordism and Keynesianism were the dominant economic theories and drivers of economic strategy since Henry Ford introduced his new mass production theories in the 1890’s. Ford reinvented the production process through his mass production lines where everything was homogenous. It meant that goods could be mass-produced and therefor were much cheaper to make and to purchase, however everything was the same and customers had no choice in what they could buy. This brought about the birth of the Post-Fordist era and neoliberalism. It became the dominant system of economic production, consumption and associated socio-economic phenomena, in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century. Post-Fordism can be characterized by

Flexible specialisation is a far cry from Fords production lines. Firms wanted to be able to alter the production process at a moments notice; they needed machines and workers to be versatile. A very good example of this in todays world is Zara, they have perfected the system of flexible specialisation, as new trends in clothing sweep the globe Zara are able to cease the production of one line and immediately start the production of another completely different clothing line, meaning that customers are always kept up to date with the newest fashion and always have a huge choice in product. Technology has been the main driver of flexible specialisation, numerical control technology was the first to be used in flexible production but was later updated and replaced by a CNC system, which came out of Japan. This new system is known as the “flexible system of production” (FSP) or the “Japanese Management System” (Thompson, und.). This flexible specialisation and Japanese management system has proven itself successful in economic production processes and regional development. It incorporates a number of economic, HRM and supply chain management theories developed in the 20th century such as dramatic reductions in information costs and overheads, Total Quality Management, just-in-time inventory control, and

Kondratiev’s theories were based on “waves” within the economic cycle, meaning that as each wave passed a new one was brought in. Fordism was Kondratiev’s fourth wave of mass production and Post-Fordism is the new technological fifth wave, which is based upon information and communication technologies (ICT) and