Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
1
strike action, to revisions of the structures and syllabuses of schools and higher
education, to reorganisation of local government – notably the abolition of a major
government critic, the Greater London Council (cf. Gamble, 1988; Kavanagh, 1990).
Fordist regime of accumulation, 1945–73
1
1
2
1
Regulation School theorists contend that these years may be characterised as the
Fordist–Keynesian era, during which a number of interconnected features ensured
that the system as a whole maintained equilibrium. Briefly, this was an expansionary
period in which mass production and consumption were in reasonable
balance, in which state involvement in economic affairs helped keep that
harmony, and in which government welfare measures assisted in this as well as
in upholding social stability.
Because Ford was the pioneer of production techniques which allowed the
manufacture of goods at a price which could encourage mass consumption, while
he was also at the forefront of payment of (relatively) high wages which also stimulated
the purchase of goods, his name has been applied to the system as a whole.
However, it would be an error to suppose that Ford’s methods were established
either everywhere or in the same way (Meyer, 1981). Rather the terminology indicates
that the Ford corporation was the archetype, especially at its peak in the
post-Second World War phase when it came to represent many of the key
elements of advanced capitalist enterprise. Similarly, since Keynes is the economist
whose policies are most closely associated with state intervention in
industrial affairs the better to manage matters, the term ‘Keynesian’ should be
understood paradigmatically rather than as suggesting that governments acted in
a uniform manner across different nations.
The Fordist–Keynesian era had a number of important distinguishing
features. We consider each of the most significant in turn.
Mass production
1
Mass production of goods was the norm. Here, in areas such as engineering, electrical
goods and automobiles, it was characteristic of the time to find standardised
products, manufactured using common processes (the assembly line system),
being created in large volume in pretty much undifferentiated patterns (fridges,
vacuum cleaners, televisions, clothing, etc.). Typically manufacturing plants were
large, at the upper end the Ford factory in Detroit having 40,000 employees on
the one site, but even in England the motor vehicle plants in Oxford (Cowley)
and Birmingham (Longbridge) each had considerably over 25,000 workers
in the late 1960s, and, since everywhere cost-effective mass production required
the economies of scale which came with size, factories of several hundred or
even thousands of employees were typical. Thus in the United Kingdom by 1963
fully one-third of the entire labour force in private sector manufacture worked
for organisations with at least 10,000 on their payroll and over 70 per cent of
65