Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
all, the people had frequently supported Labour between 1945 and the 1970s, so
what had changed? More generally, there was widespread awareness of rapid
transformations taking place – large-scale redundancies in traditional industries,
new job titles, a rush of new technologies, dramatic exchange rate upheavals and
so on – which convinced many commentators that something radically different
was coming into being. Not surprisingly perhaps, a great deal of writing was
produced which highlighted the ‘New Times’ (1988).
Unfortunately, however, it is precisely this emphasis on radically ‘new times’
conjured by the concept post-Fordism that causes the most difficulty. The suggestion
is, necessarily, that society has undergone deep, systemic transformation.
And, indeed, what else is one to conclude when post-Fordism’s characteristics
are presented as so markedly different from what has gone before? On virtually
every measure – from the conduct of production, class structures, the manner
of consumption, work relations, even to conceptions of self – post-Fordism’s
features are presented in ways which mark it as a break with the Fordist era
(cf. Hall and Jacques, 1989).
It is because of this that one may note an ironic congruence between post-
Fordism and the conservative post-industrial society theory of Daniel Bell that
we encountered in Chapter 3, there being a shared concern sharply to distinguish
the present from the recent past, to depict a new age coming into being, albeit
that the conceptions have significantly different intellectual traditions. In fact,
Krishan Kumar (1992) goes so far as to identify post-Fordism as a ‘version of
post-industrial theory’ (p. 47), one which concerns itself with remarkably similar
themes and trends.
Against this it is salutary to be reminded that, to the extent that private property,
market criteria and corporate priorities are hegemonic, and these are
acknowledged to be such at least in Regulation School versions of post-Fordism,
a very familiar form of capitalism still pertains. Hence it might be suggested that
the term ‘neo-Fordism’, with its strong evocation of the primacy of continuities
over change, is more appropriate. Put in this way, the suggestion is that neo-
Fordism is an endeavour to rebuild and strengthen capitalism rather than to
suggest its supersession.
Most objections, at least to strong versions of the theory, centre on the
conception’s tendency to emphasise change over continuity. This leads adherents
too readily to endorse a binary opposition (Fordism or post-Fordism) which
oversimplifies historical processes and underestimates the uninterrupted presence
of capitalist relations through time. This is not the occasion to amplify these
objections, so instead I signal some of the more telling criticisms of the theory:
• The depiction of Fordism suggests an equilibrium that was far from the case
between 1945 and 1973. For example, in Britain between 1950 and the
mid-1970s one-third of farm workers’ jobs were lost (Pollard, 1983, p. 275;
Newby, 1977, p. 81), a striking feature of the agricultural landscape, but one
which brought forth no social theories of profound social change.
Indeed, when one comes across post-Fordists insisting that, for example,
class politics is outmoded because the working class (taken to be manual
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