Kenneth Green

Information Technologies, the Service Sector and the Restructuring of Consumption

As we first outlined in Chapter 2, information technologies are applicable not only to such manufacturing sectors as small-batch engineering but also to other sectors which have traditionally proved very difficult to organise on Fordist lines. In particular, this includes those sectors which have not been based on the use of much sophisticated machinery, either in terms of transformation, transfer or control. We refer to the application of information technologies in the supply and production of so-called ‘services’ to which this chapter is devoted. The chapter examines this sector to see whether neo-Fordist developments can be identified. After looking at what the service sector actually comprises, we examine various organisational changes that have taken place in one part of the sector that has been most affected by developments in computer technology since the 1950s — clerical work. We wish to develop the idea that information technologies being introduced into such work in the 1980s are best seen as associated with neo-Fordist organisational changes.

On New Technologies and ‘Automation’

The last few years have seen the introduction of several new technologies into industry and commerce which are said to have ‘automated’ many previously labour-intensive production activities. Yet such automation has not in any simple way been the cause of the high level of unemployment which the advanced capitalist countries are experiencing in the 1980s. That unemployment, although partly exacerbated in some countries by demand deficiency as a direct result of government policies, has structural causes. The slump of the early 1980s needs to be explained in terms of these structural features of the world economy before labour-displacing technological change can be satisfactorily analysed.

Mechanisation and the Labour Process from 1850

Looking back over the past 130 years we can see some patterns in the development of production machinery. The patterns have expressed themselves in leading industrial sectors at different times since the mid-nineteenth century. In this chapter we shall try to identify how those machine systems measure up against the classification scheme we have developed from the work of Bright and Bell. Of particular interest, of course, are changes in the labour process which link machinery developments to the broader structural changes within the development of the capitalist mode of production.

Neo-Fordism in Small-batch Engineering

In this chapter we will take the example of small-batch engineering and argue that this is a sector which is undergoing neo-Fordist changes. The sector is important because of its position in the production of capital goods. Hence, transformations in technology and organisation within this sector which result in cheapening its products are likely to have widespread effects throughout many other sectors which use these capital goods.

Conclusion: From Fordism to Neo-Fordism?

In this book we try to show and investigate seven things: 1. We demonstrate how technological developments of the past hundred years can be seen as a progression of overlapping phases of primary, secondary and tertiary mechanisation, exemplified in particular leading industrial sectors; those developments seen within certain work organisational contexts, in labour processes, can be shown to link with long waves in capitalist economic growth. 2. We argue that the technological basis of the post-World War Two boom period of the fourth long wave can be seen as the generalisation of secondary mechanisation with the emergence, in a small number of industries, of tertiary mechanisation. 3. We identify Fordism as the dominant labour/production process paradigm of the boom period of the fourth long wave. 4. We see the depression of the 1980s as one of a crisis of a specific form of capital accumulation, based on particular Fordist production methods, products and consumption patterns which came from and led developed economies out of the depression of the 1930s.

New Technology and Neo-Fordism

In Chapter 3 we considered the central role of Fordism in the post-war upswing. Fordism, characterised by a technological paradigm of the high-volume production of standardised products, gained its efficiency by means of an acute division of labour along with the use of specialised machinery ‘dedicated’ to the production of long runs. But as we and others have argued, with increasing competition between firms, the effects of the generalisation of collective bargaining on wage costs and limitations to the exploitation of economies of scale, the potential for further extension and deepening of Fordism, at least within developed countries, has progressively diminished.

Mechanisation and Long Waves

Chapter 1 drew attention to the recent interest in theories of long-term economic development which might throw some light on the causes of the current economic crisis and on means of solving it. Such theories are usually called ‘long wave’ theories.1 There are three reasons why we examine long wave theories in this book. First, they offer, more than any other body of economic theory, a way of examining the historical significance of major technological change. Second, the proposed dating of them corresponds at various points to our analysis of phases of mechanisation. Third, they themselves propose a role for ‘automation’ which deserves attention, given our focus on mechanisation.