There is currently much speculation that capitalist industry is undergoing major qualitative change. ‘Flexibility’ has been the most common way of talking about this change. While there are many aspects to what’s new in the new social economy, many have little to do with flexibility.

We shall outline the main claims of the flexible specialisation thesis. Then we shall investigate the nature of Fordism and flexibility, assessing the claim of a crisis in Fordism. We suggest that capitalism always involves a combination of flexibilities and rigidities – given rise to the term the ‘flexible rigidities’, which characterises the Japanese economy. Indeed, we can better grasp the changing nature of the economy in terms of new forms of integration and organisation of the division of labour (see last week’s lecture).

According to flexible specialisation thesis, from 1930s-1970s, the advanced capitalist countries were dominated by Fordism – by mass production of standardised goods in huge factories within large, vertically integrated global firms, producing standardised products for mass consumption. Towards the end of that period, the system had begun to exhaust its potential: mass markets had begun to break up as consumers tired of standardised products; labour resistance had built up; industries met inherent technical barriers, such as bottlenecks; and the system was too rigid to cope with the uncertainty of the recession. Meanwhile a new model of flexible specialisation, or post-Fordism, has allegedly been emerging: small batch production in interlinked, specialised small firms, flexible in organisation, work process and output, and tending to concentrate spatially into industrial districts. Microelectronics and information technology play a key in allowing more flexible production and closer coordination between markets and producers targeting new market niches. Firms are supposedly becoming more responsive to support the construction of personal identities.

The rhetoric of flexible specialisation and post-Fordism has an underlying dualistic framework:

Old Times ------------------------- New Times

FordismFlexible ---------------------- specialisation/post-Fordism

Rigidity -------------------------------- flexibility, responsiveness, resilience

mass production ---------------------- small batch production

dedicated machinery ----------------- flexible machinery

standardised products --------------- differentiated products

Just-In-Case/ large stocks ----------- Just-In-Time/ minimal stocks

Taylorism/ deskilling ---------------- post-Taylorism/ enskilling

vertical integration ------------------- vertical disintegration

global firms --------------------------- industrial districts

The main attraction of this kind of thinking is its simplicity and symmetry. Yet, although dualism are powerful ways of registering difference, the credibility of this rhetoric becomes strained, so that the future is presented as the opposite of the past. Indeed, they cause serious distortion.

Let us consider some of the main senses of the term Fordism:

1. A labour process involving moving assembly line mass production.
2. A group of volume production sectors, including cars, steel, chemicals, dominant in terms of production of surplus value and propels other sectors forward.
3. An allegedly hegemonic form of industrial organisation consisting of large integrated corporations and factories, sectoral oligopolies, and characterised by the production methods of (a).
4. A ‘mode of regulation’ in which mass consumption absorbs the output of mass production, thanks to productivity-related wages for core workers in Fordist industry.

As already noted, it is suggested that Fordism has experienced a crisis, and reached its limits. In particular problems of technical bottlenecks, long-set-up times, labour disaffection, stock/inventory build-up, and break-up of mass markets into niches. However, there are several problems with such claims.

1. There is no reason why new mass industrial sectors should not flourish using Fordist methods. An alternative interpretation of the crisis would attribute it not to problems inherent in Fordism as a labour process, but to market saturation and the relative lack of new sectors and products.
2. Fordism need not generate progressively worse working conditions for workers and hence build up labour resistance. The labour disputes of the 1960s were more a function of the general political-economic situation than an inevitable consequence of Fordist labour processes.
3. It is not evident that the break-up of mass markets can be attributed to Fordist production. Declining mass markets may be due to exogenous features, such as crisis itself, falling demand, penetration of national markets by the different products of foreign producers, and product innovation in general.
4. While capitalism can be characterised by Fordism, and capitalism may be in crisis, it doesn’t follow that Fordism is in crisis. The crisis may be induced by over-investment and falling rate of profit (Marxist’s analysis of capital).

More generally, arguments about the crisis of Fordism are unacceptable because they switch between concepts of Fordism without acknowledging their differences. Thus if we are going to use a broad version of the concept (sense (d)), we cannot justify the claims regarding crisis at those levels by reference to the alleged problems of Fordism in the narrow sense of complex, mass, mechanical assembly (sense (a)).

Buzz-words like flexibility are initially attractive because they offer the promise of escape from old concepts (e.g. scale economies, mass production) whose limitations are too great. Yet, their promises prove false. Many users of the term have deliberately or unintentionally overlooked its double-edged and value-laden character: flexibility sounds agreeable in the abstract, but not always when considered in the concrete; e.g., the damaging effects of working alternating day and night-time shifts. The resulting ‘discourse of flexibility’ involves ideological slippage between description, prediction and prescription that masks the vital political issue of the different interests at stake – whose flexibility, and in whose interest?

What has to be recognised is that industry has always combined flexibilities and inflexibilities (so called ‘flexible rigidities’). What may be emerging now are new combinations of each rather than a simple trend towards greater flexibility alone. What is therefore needed is not an obsessive focus on flexibility but a broader awareness of new forms of the division of labour and new ways of organising these divisions.

The term flexibility refers to several things:

1. flexibility in output volume;
2. product flexibility, allowing the firm to change its product configuration over the short run without marked losses of efficiency;
3. flexible employment;
4. flexible working practices;
5. flexible machinery;
6. flexibility in restructuring;
7. flexible organisational form; e.g. networks of specialist producers.

There has been much confusion among these in the literature. For example to confuse product flexibility with flexibility restructuring.

Note that while there are many complementarities between the above features, they can exist and generate benefits to capital separately; flexible technology need not be associated with flexible working practices, even though capital often obtains greater benefits when they are combined. There are also many different routes to flexibility. For example, task flexibility can be generated through extensive use of external labour markets and greater use of temporary workers, part-timers and outside contractors can assist numerical flexibility. On the other hand, task flexibility can be facilitated by greater use of internal labour market, reducing labour turnover, increasing training in a range of skills, and willingness to move within the firm in return for job security.

Further, many of the above kinds of flexibility can either facilitate the production of a fixed product range or they can facilitate product flexibility. It follows that some kinds of flexibility can be useful not only to so-called flexible specialisation but to standardised mass production. We should challenge the very idea of treating mass production and flexible as alternatives, which underpins the ‘Fordist/post-Fordist debate’.