Fordist And Taylorist Production Systems Cultural Studies Essay

Fordist And Taylorist Production Systems Cultural Studies Essay Fordism, named after the Henry Ford from US, who refers to a variety of communal theories about production, assembling and related socio-economic phenomena  [1]  . Although Henry Ford was not the inventor of the automobile but he developed extraordinary methods of production and marketing that allowed the automobile to become reachable to the American working class. Ford always wanted to make cars that his team workers could afford easily. So, the mass production began in Detroit in 1914, when Ford discovered that a moving assembly line using interchangeable parts which could completely reduce the cost of making motor cars. After that he created the Ford Motor Company, which was one of a dozen small automobile manufacturers that emerged in the early 20th century. Mass production was really an unpleasant work, with high turnover because new production system must be oriented towards multi-skilling and rapid re-skilling workers; in order to hold the search for shifting a newly form ing market in a post mass production (cf. Piore, M. and Sabel, C., 1984). Just to retain his unskilled workforce, Ford doubled their wages to $5 per day justified by higher productivity  [2]  . After three years of production, he introduced the Model T, which was simple and light yet sturdy enough to drive on the countrys very elementary road system. He sold 18m Model T Fords, transforming to America into the first car-owning democracy, at a low price that dropped from $600 to $250 over 15 years. Henry Fords success and revolutionary techniques of production were then termed Fordism  [3]  . The scale of mass production is hard to understand. Fords River Rouge plant in Detroit, completed in 1928, he extended for a mile along a tributary of the Detroit River and employed 100,000 men workers. Raw materials like iron ore and rubber were unloaded at one end, and finished cars emerged from the other end, 72 hours later. But Fords system proved less efficient than GM  [4]  , which produced a range of models for different pocketbooks. Labour relations were troubled, sit-down strike, at the big automakers in the 1930s with layoffs and speed-ups, the end of organized capitalism has a tendency to become dis-organized in that the labour-employer relationships are fracturing (cf. Lash, S. and Urry, J. 1987) . GM was the first company forced to recognize the UAW  [5]  union after a sit-down strike closed its plants in Flint, Michigan in 1937. After more battles, the workers won higher wages and benefits, sharing in the American Dream. Unions also negotiated rigid work rules to protect workers from exploitation by foremen. Ford was even more determined to oppose unions than GM, and Henry Ford employed 3,000 service department personnel to prevent them taking hold. In 1937 they beat up key UAW union organizers attempting to hand out leaflets near the River Rouge factory. But in 1941, even Ford was forced to yield to union power, to ensure industrial peace during wartime. But the legacy of bitter industrial relations e ndured. The decline of mass production is due to Post Fordism; small scale batch production in small medium plants not mass production in large plant, only customized not standardized products, using multi-skilled workers with flexible work roles not fixed job descriptions, robots and computerized work teams instead of moving assembly lines (cf. Murray, R. 1989). Car manufacture ceased with the outbreak of World War II, but the auto manufacturers made good profits helping with the war effort, producing everything from jeeps to aircraft engines. The mass production helped the Allies win the war, and led to further consolidation in the industry. The war also brought new social groups, like women and black people, into the auto industry, but also increased social tensions in Detroit. Unemployment disappeared, and the UAWs power grew. The end of the war released an enormous surge of pent-up demand, especially for cars and houses, and Detroit boomed as never before. Car workers wages soared and many became homeowners. The Big three car companies dominated production as never before. In 1955 GM became the first company to make $1bn profit. Big cars predominated, promoted by sexy adverts  [6]  . The first signs that all was not well with Detroit was the 1973 oil crisis, when Middle East producers declared a boycott. Queues formed at petrol stations, and consumers for the first time switched in large numbers to smaller, more economical cars-often made by the Japanese; which they found more reliable. The Detroit-made cars had more defects, and Detroits attempts to build a successful small car failed. The auto industry now is much better prepared to withstand the effects of an oil crisis and meet consumer demand for highly fuel-efficient vehicles than it was during the Middle East oil crisis of the 1970s, Ford Motor Company Chairman Harold A. Poling said  [7]  . Imports of Japanese cars soared in the 1980s as consumers gradually grew to prefer the smaller, more reliable cars. The unions and the US companies reacted to the threat by trying to get the US government to block imports, and by the mid-1980s had succeeded in getting Japan to agree intended export chains (cf. Womack, J., P., Jones, J.T., Roos, D., 1990). But the move backfired as Japanese firms became more profitable and moved up market, launching cars like the Lexus. The US companies determined that they could make more money by selling sports utility vehicles, built on a truck chassis. In the 1990s sales of SUVs  [8]  and minivans soared. Imported SUVs attracted a higher tariff rate, blocking Japanese rivals. They were not very fuel-efficient, but with oil prices at $18 a barrel, no one seemed to mind. As imports flooded in, the car market became increasingly dominated by foreign producers, who imported millions of cars from overseas factories. Companies also increasingly relo cated production to Canada and Mexico after the Nafta free trade agreement. GM, Ford and Chrysler thought that the Japanese had an unfair advantage due to an undervalued (low) currency. They also believed that oil prices would return to lower levels. Lean production, Japanese manufacturers like Toyota and Nissan were also building more factories within the US to escape import controls, threat from Japan,(cf. Womack, J., P., Jones, J.T., Roos, D., 1990) in the response to eliminate waste by introducing this method. These factories were based on a new and more efficient production system, and they also allowed the transplants to develop new models more quickly. They also developed closer relationships with suppliers, using just-in-time methods. Soon they were competing across the whole range of vehicles, from trucks to compact cars. Green cars, in the last year many Americans have accepted the reality of global warming, and the demand for green vehicles has grown. Toyota sells 100,000 Prius hybrids a year and is rolling the hybrid technology out across its entire range. Both Ford and GM exposed electric-powered concept cars at the 2007 Detroit Motor Show, but they may be years away from mass production. Taylorism, a system of production devised by F. W. Taylor (1911), and characterized by the division of factory work into the smallest and simplest jobs while closely co-ordinating the sequence of tasks in order to achieve maximum efficiency, as, for example, on a production line. As a result, skilled managers and technicians oversee semi-skilled or unskilled workers who are engaged in simple, repetitive chores. This system of production has had profound spatial implications, as large firms often allocate skilled and unskilled jobs to different locations, creating a division of labour  [9]  . Taylorism is often mentioned along with Fordism, because it was closely associated with mass production methods in manufacturing factories. Taylors own name for his approach was scientific management  [10]  . Applications of scientific management sometimes fail to account for two inherent difficulties: Individuals are different from each other: the most efficient way of working for one person may be inefficient for another. The economic interests of workers and management are rarely identical, so that both the measurement processes and the retraining required by Taylors methods are frequently resented and sometimes sabotaged by the workforce. Both difficulties were recognized by Taylor, but are generally not fully addressed by managers who only see the potential improvements to efficiency. Taylor believed that scientific management cannot work unless the worker benefits. In his view management should arrange the work in such a way that one is able to produce more and get paid more, by teaching and implementing more efficient procedures for producing a product. Although Taylor did not compare workers with machines, some of his critics use this image to explain how his approach makes work more efficient by removing unnecessary or wasted effort (cf. Parker M. and Slaughter, J., 1988). However, some would say that this approach ignores the complications introduced because workers are necessarily human: personal needs, interpersonal difficulties and the very real difficulties introduced by making jobs so efficient that workers have no time to relax. As a result, workers worked harder, but became dissatisfied with the work environment. Some have argued that this discounting of worker personalities led to the rise of labour unions. It can also be said that the rise in labor unions is leading to a push on the part of industry to accelerate the process of automation, a process that is undergoing a renaissance with the invention of a host of new technologies starting with the computer and the Internet. This shift in production to machines was clearly one of the goals of Taylorism (cf. Berggren, C., 1989), and represents a victory for his theories. It may not be adaptive to changing scenarios; it overemphasizes routine procedures, i.e. strictly following a given set of rules and regulations, work procedures, production centeredness etc. However, tactfully choosing to ignore the still controversial process of automating human work is also politically expedient, so many still say that practical problems caused by Taylorism led to its replacement by the human relations school of management in 1930. Others (cf. Braverman, H., 1974) insisted that human relations did not replace Taylorism but that both approaches are rather opposite: Taylorism determining the actual organization of the work process and human relations helping to adapt the workers to the new procedures. However, Taylors theories were clearly at the roots of a global revival in theories of scientific management in the last two decades of the 20th century, under the moniker of corporate reengineering or business process re-engineering (cf. Milkman, R., 1997). As such, Taylors ideas can be seen as the root of a very influential series of developments in the workplace, with the goal being the eventual elimination of industrys need for unskilled, and later perhaps, even most skilled labor in any form, directly following Taylors recipe for deconstructing a process. This has come to be known as commoditization, and no skilled profession, even medicine, has proven to be immune from the efforts of Taylors followers, the re-engineers, who are often called derogatory names such as bean counters. A complex division of labour  [11]  and the expansion of economic interdependence accompanied the emergence of industrial capitalism. The division of labour reached its logical conclusion in the emergence of Taylorism and its mass production partner, Fordism. These had their weaknesses including high start-up costs and a relatively rigid production process. Such low-trust systems can be contrasted with high-trust systems, where workers operate with greater autonomy and cooperation. A whole series of techniques and initiatives are described by the term post-Fordism including group production and mass customization. These are epitomized by the Quality Circle, a concept alien to Taylorist assumptions that workers need to be stripped of opportunities for creative input. Such systems tend to be marked by high skill levels and rapid turnover of product designs. The decline of manufacturing industry as an employer can be explained both by competition from the Far East and the increasing rate of technological change. Global production systems have also contributed to the movement of industry around the world. These processes have led to a steady decline in trade union membership since the 1970s. The separation of home and work contributed to the marginalization of women from paid employment, a pattern gradually reversed during the twentieth century. Within the economy women remain concentrated in poorly paid routine occupations  [12]  . Either work becomes recreated as womens work, or heartlands of female employment slowly have their status eroded over time. Labour-force participation is higher among childless women, though many more females now return to their full-time jobs after childbirth than they did a decade ago. Women dominate part-time employment, though their reasons for remaining in such jobs remain the source of controversy  [13]  . The most notable change in working life in developed countries has been the expansion of female participation in the paid labour market and resulting erosion of the male breadwinner model within families. Among men, the trend has been away from manual work and currently also away from routine non-manual labour. These trends have levelled off in recent years, with women remaining over-represented in routine white-collar jobs and men over-represented in skilled manual work. Despite womens advances across the economy, the top posts remain the preserve of men. Women in the most recent generation have benefited from the legislation passed in the 1970s, but the pay divide remains substantial over a lifetime. Debates on skills in the workplace have tended to become polarized between those, (cf. Braverman, H., 1974), who see capitalism as continually deskilling the workforce as new machines and technologies replace crafts and creativity; who argue that it is not technology but the way this i s used that is most important  [14]  . Unemployment has a long history and has ebbed and flowed throughout the twentieth century. There are significant effects for individuals, communities and the wider society. These are disproportionately borne by the young and ethnic minorities. A key task for individuals will be to find ways of forging long-term life plans in a society that privileges the short-term. In 1990s the the new industrial relations associated with the introduction of HRM, also seeks to create an atmosphere and a framework for union-management collaboration (cf. Guest, D., 1989, Storey, J., 1992). From the above it is possible to deduce some conclusions. First of all, there are changes in the way by which work is done and controlled. The Fordism model is dictatorial, with rigid discipline, technical and specific personnel training, taking man as a simple addition of the machine and separating the intellectual from the manual work. Classical management control is performed by rigid supervision procedures. The number of problem with general post-Fordist paradigm has implication for the potential embedding (cf. Kelly, J., 1998) The post-Fordist model presents flexible authority and control systems by which conformism and passivity open spaces for dynamism and creativity (according to the management model established earlier). However, when this analysis is centred on the objects and ideology that guide the productive process, one can conclude that no evolution has occurred. Management, yesterday and today, aims toward maximum rationalization of the production system, greater increase in productivity, profitability and competition, maintaining together the older way of production (cf. Sparrow, P. and Marchington, M., 1998). When that concentration is measured in employment terms, aggregate data for the mid-70s to the mid-80s show that larger firms in all three societies have been shedding labour, even though disproportionately. This fact must be analysed also by the quality of employment, the quality of life and the security of economic recovery, and not just from the point of view of job creation in terms of head-counts. The de-centralization of decision-making and flattening of managerial hierarchies in post-Fordist has led to a de-centralization of managerial control, or whether Fordist centralized management control is being maintained, even in spatially decentralized units, through the development of new control technologies (cf. Lane, C., 1995). In fact, there is not, in either model, a proposal that guarantee the autonomy of the worker. In both, Taylor and Ford, task obligations are reached through rigid control and supervision concerning the worker. In the post-Fordism model, task obligations occur by way of a rigid management scheme. Direct supervisory control is inhibited, assuming either the form of auto-control or control by complex technological procedures; nevertheless, it continues to exist. Beyond the work strengthening and capital concentration, the post-Fordism model maintains the division of work, although on more ample bases. If in Taylorism-Fordism the tasks were broken down into simple and routine movements, in post-Fordism the division into fractions of work happens with the attribution of responsibility to the groups that fulfil a set of specific tasks (activities). There is widespread agreement in the literature that due to the need for more flexible and speedier reaction to changing market demands, de-centralization of decision-making and flattening of managerial hierarchies has occurred (cf. Lane, C., 1995). However, there is little systematic evidence as to what form that de-centralization has taken and which hierarchical levels have been affected. To the post-Fordism is like Fordism as well as post-modernism is like modernism. Postmodernism is another version of that historical amnesia characteristic of American culture the tyranny of the new. According to the Green (cf. Green, A., 1997), postmodernism should be seen not as a development beyond modernism but rather as a continuation of a certain idealist current within it. One can make the same statement about Fordism and post-Fordism. Finally, it seems opportune to repeat the words of Ford from back in the 40s (cf. Ford, H., 1991): We are not living in a machine age; we are living in the power age. This power age of ours has great possibilities, depending upon how we use it. Of course it can be mistreated. But, it can also be used greatly to benefit mankind. If this sentence were true during that period of time, today it seems even more adequate. References

Lorraine Hansberrys A Raisin In The Sun Essay -- English Literature

Raisin in the Sun In the story â€Å"Raisin in the Sun† there is basically a group of characters all in one family living in a small apartment with everyday their love dying a little more. The family is black and through the whole play it shows how segregation was played in the 1950's. Ruth Younger is a wife of Walter Younger and a Mother of Travis Younger who is living in a small living assortment and just wants to get away and move on to something bigger and something more independent. Now with her being pregnant everything for her is just going down hill. Walter Younger is the husband of Ruth and he is just a self-centered jerk who doesn’t care about anybody’s life but his. He wants to open his own business and he doesn’t care whether the family can afford it he just wants to open a business and he wants to do it whether they approve or not. Walter gets drunk and comes home drunk and makes the Younger’s life they are living worse because everyone else has to put u p with his â€Å"drunken† behavior. Mama Younger is basically the woman who takes care of everybody and everything. She has a plant that she goes to when times are hard or when she needs strength and hope. Beneatha Younger is Mama’s daughter and Walter’s sister and she is just a brat. She doesn’t know anything she is going to do in her life and she doesn’t know what she wants to do when she grows up. Now with al of that school, she has two guys come into her life, George Murchison and Asagai and that just puts more pressure on her than before and things get a little wild there. Travis Younger is Walter and Ruth’s child and he is just there in the story and at the end Walter changes his whole decision to set a good example on Travis. So Travis saves the day there. The play is full of segregation and hate towards different races and the way that a small living can impact the love of a family and the way they treat each other. Plus the hopes an d dreams that everyone has because of something that arrives in the mail get torn apart because of a dramatic climax with a very irresponsible person. Walter and Beneatha’s Father has died and there is a big check coming of his life savings of $10,000 and that is the thing that just tears the family apart. Big family, small living, lots of money, what will happen? Now, like I told you before, there is something big that is coming in the mail and it is going to cha... ...ause of the changing of one person who made all problems worse but made the biggest problem better. I basically already said the important issues that were addressed was segregation and the pride that the black people really had in themselves. Also how sad it was that some black people were willing to give in and sell their pride to the white people because the white people had more power and the blacks just wanted to make them happy and go on with their lives. That’s how sad some of the blacks were in their pride. If we could have had all black Mother’s like how Mama was then the whole black race would have had so much more self-confidence in themselves and so much more pride in themselves that they would have never let the white people push them around and they would work their hardest to be treated equally all the time. The play really made me think how much of an impact black speakers had on black people on the fight of segregation and how much everything has ch anged from the 1950's to today and how great it is that all people of all races are coming together as one, big, happy family Like the blacks sang on their road to freedom, â€Å"We shall overcome, some day†... they sure did.

Magazine articles Essay

This paper summarizes two articles related to physics. One, written by Appell David, discussing the possibility of our planet Earth, being engulfed by sun, eventually. Second, is a news item, on the largest Neutrino Telescopic being built at the south Pole. Both articles have appeared in the magazine, ‘Science Daily’. In the first article, the writer claims that the scientific community believes that the sun is expanding making itself more brighter. After billions of years, it would expand so much that it would engulf earth. To be precise, â€Å"About 7. 6 billion years from now, the sun will reach its maximum size as a red giant: its surface will extend beyond Earth’s orbit today by 20 percent and will shine 3,000 times brighter. In its final stage, the sun will collapse into a white dwarf †. ( David Appell) This theory was disagreed on the basis that, as Sun expands, it will be loosing on its mass, and due that the gravitation force will also be reduced. Hence, as the gravitation force reduces, Earth will be drifting away from Sun, and hence, maybe able to escape the engulfment. However, recent calculations, based on the perturbation theory, released by Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics, by Lorenzo Lorio, tend to agree with this theory. The factor that tends credibility to his argument is not his number game, but his statement that as Sun loses mass and expands, its rotation must also slow down. This is known as angular momentum, in simple terms. Due to this angular momentum, there will be a huge tidal bow on sun’s surface, and its gravitational pull will engulf Earth. Hence, all celestial bodies, within a distance of 1. 5 AU will be engulfed. This article throws a new light on our futuristic cosmic vision, using principle of physics, which quite old. Now, the concept of angular momentum, can be used to depict the future of celestial bodies also. This was not the case so far. The second article is a news report, on work being done University of Delaware, in the South pole, regarding erection of world’s largest neutrino telescope. Neutrino, is one of the fundamental constituents of matter, they have no charge and interact very weakly, so they can travel millions of miles through space. They can pass through planets also. The working principle of this telescope is radically different from the conventional ones. â€Å"consists of kilometer-long strings of 60 optical detectors frozen more than a mile deep in the Antarctic ice like beads on a necklace. Atop each string of deep detectors sits a pair of 600-gallon Ice-Top tanks, each containing two optical detectors†. (Science news) The ice-top detectors measure the particles that are generated by the high-energy cosmic rays that are continuously being showered from the cosmos, towards earth. Whenever a flash of light is detected, the nearby laboratory receives the communication, and its genesis is traced. This genesis could be way an exploding star or a the black hole. The learning derived from this news report is the drastic pace at which research methods are changing and being innovated upon. This new research method, of mounting a telescope beneath the ocean, may change the definition of telescope also, because, conventionally. , a telescope is a instrument on the surface of Earth, facing the skies !!! It also reminds us of the never ending human thirst for acquisition of knowledge, in all spheres, including the terrestrial space. To quench this thirst, he constantly keeps on deriving and experimenting with new means and methods. Renaissance, and the subsequent development of subordinate equipment systems, ahs changed the very way we live our lives !!! References: 1) Appell David, ( September 2008), â€Å" The sun will eventually engulf Earth-maybe†, retrieved on 11 December 2008 from : < http://www. sciam. com/article. cfm? id=the-sun-will-eventually-engulf-earth- maybe> 2) Science news, ( 11 December 2008) Building world’s largest Neutrino Telescope at South Pole, Science Daily, retrieved on 12 December 2008 from: < http://www. sciencedaily. com/releases/2008/12/081209221746. htm >

Rhetorical Analysis, Mickey Mouse - 962 Words

Rhetorical Analysis 10 February 2013 In the article The Masks of Mickey Mouse, Robert Brockway explains how Mickey Mouse was one of the most important cultural symbols during the twentieth century. The article discusses how mickey mouse went from being a slap stick cartoon character like all other animated personalities and grew into a much more complicated being. He was the sign of hope and escape during the depression and evolved even more into the dominating avatar of Disney itself. Brockway begins his article by describing Walt Disney himself trying to explain the dramatic success of his simply drawn cartoon character. It starts the article by showing the reader that even Disney himself is shocked by the massive popularity the†¦show more content†¦Mickey also began his career with a slapstick style as did many artists in the twenties. Unlike Felix though, Mickey didn’t remain in the slapstick genre of comedy. According to Durgnat, slapstick emerges from childlike impulsiveness, drea m fantasy and visual poetry. The â€Å"slapstick comedians are childlike, and†¦ act out impulses which as adults we suppress (Profiles of Popular Culture 83).† Disney evolved Mickey Mouse during the thirties because of the tone that America had taken. The economic crisis called for a different kind of comedy a more upbeat type. The bleakness of everyday life called for a cartoon that displayed sentimental escapism. Brockway claims that Disney seamlessly changed the style of his cartoon to relate to the changing times in America with shorts called Silly Symphonies (84). Brockway writes that this is not the only evolution Mickey must go through to stay relevant. During the second world war, Mickey is matured again to fit with the times. He goes from short films to being the face of the corporate Disney image. Brockway claims he became the â€Å"organized man (86).† Brockway’s final point in the text is that Mickey, as many heroes do, will die out in populari ty asShow MoreRelatedWalt Disney : The Organization Background Essay1881 Words   |  8 Pages In octuber 16th, 1923 Walt signed a contract with J. Winkler to produce a series of cartoon comedies, also this day is known as the day that Disney start, at that time with the name of The Disney Brothers Studio. Seven years after the first Mickey Mouse comic strip was release and in 1932 the first full-color cartonn is released, creating a new way of perceiving cartoons. December 21st of 1937 was an important day for The Disney Brothers Studio, because it eas when the first long film was premiereRead More Symbolism of Mount Rushmore Essay2678 Words   |  11 Pagesmyriad of issues. Michael McGee defined ideographs as â€Å"culturally-grounded, summarizing, and authoritative terms that enact their meaning by expressing an association of cultural ideals and experience in an ever-evolving and reifying form within the rhetorical environment† (Edwards and Winkler 204). Ideographs function to elicit emotion from the public through their association to common concepts and their application to different societal issues. Words like â€Å"freedom† and â€Å"democracy† act as ideographsRead MoreCorporate Communications - the Case of the Walt Disney Company13529 Words   |  55 Pagesshareholder-centric organisation. We suggest that Disney is fully aware of the importance of employee engagement to achieve positive work performance in the a dvancement of company goals and objectives, but identify a dichotemy of strategy whereby the companys rhetorical championing of innovation and creativity is antithetical to the reality of the Disney cast member experience. Internal communication is top-down and cast members have no identifyable feedback mechanism to buy into company policy. We maintainRead MoreOrganisational Theory230255 Words   |  922 Pagestheory focuses attention on the human issues in organization ‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’ How Roethlisberger developed a ‘practical’ organization theory Column 1: The core contributing social sciences Column 2: The techniques for analysis Column 3: The neo-modernist perspective Column 4: Contributions to business and management Four combinations of science, scientific technique and the neo-modernist approach reach different parts of the organization Level 1: Developing the organizationRead MoreDeveloping Management Skills404131 Wo rds   |  1617 PagesLine 58 Understanding and Appreciating Individual Differences Important Areas of Self-Awareness 61 Emotional Intelligence 62 Values 65 Ethical Decision Making and Values 72 Cognitive Style 74 Attitudes Toward Change 76 Core Self-Evaluation 79 SKILL ANALYSIS 84 Cases Involving Self-Awareness 84 Communist Prison Camp 84 Computerized Exam 85 Decision Dilemmas 86 SKILL PRACTICE 89 Exercises for Improving Self-Awareness Through Self-Disclosure 89 Through the Looking Glass 89 Diagnosing Managerial Characteristics