Dominant Divisions of Labor: Models of Production That Have Transformed the World of Work

Models of Production that have Transformed the World of Work

T. Janoski, D. Lepadatu

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137378774
• eBook ISBN: 9781137370235
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

The past century of labor was definitively captured by theories like Fordism and Taylorism, or scientific managment, but how do we make sense of global production today? This short book takes a panoramic view of the candidates for the most succinct theory of the 21st century division of labor, including post-Fordism, flexible accumulation, McDonaldization, Waltonism, Nikeification, Gatesism and Siliconism, shareholder value, and lean production and Toyotism. Authors Thomas Janoski and Darina Lepadatu argue that lean production in a somewhat expanded version presents three variations: Toyotism (the strongest form), Nikeification (a moderate form with off-shored plants lacking teamwork) and Waltonism (the merchandising form that presses for off-shoring). While all three share strong elements of "just in time" (JIT) production and supply chain management, they differ in how teamwork and long-term philosophies are valued. This critical review of dominant established theories serves to inform subsequent research on the contemporary international division of labor.

1

Introduction to Divisions of Labor

Abstract: This chapter introduces the concept of division of labor starting with Emile Durkheim and Adam Smith and clearly articulates the purpose of the book, which is to discuss various versions of the division of labor that have emerged from the previous version of Taylorism and Fordism.

Keywords: division of labor, Taylorism, Fordism, lean production

Janoski, Thomas and Lepadatu, Darina. Dominant Divisions of Labor: Models of Production That Have Transformed the World of Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137370235.

In 1974, a remarkable guide to the perplexed about the division of labor was written by a former cooper and steel worker. Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital reasserted the Marxian concept of the “labor process,” and pushed scientific management from the machine shop into the growing service sector with examples of clerical and professional workers. It showed how the separation of mental and manual labor under tightly disciplined management was invading new territories of work. Taylorism went from promoting production efficiency and ergonomics in factories to the industrial engineers examining white collar workers in service work. So Braverman’s theory was not just for the machine shop, but it applied throughout the burgeoning clerical, service, and white collar world. In fact, one could wonder what area of social life could they not be applied? The authors of Cheaper by the Dozen, who were Frederick Taylor’s compatriots Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, applied scientific principles to raising their 12 children and their own family life. While movie goers found this amusing in two films made in 1950 and 1952, workers found little solace in their imposed drudgery. And while scientific management did not take hold of families, its principles of rationality enveloped the world of work. Braverman’s book took Taylorism and Fordism to another level with his extension to the higher level of the economy as a whole. And this energized an entire cohort of sociological scholars in the sociology of work, economy, and even theory as part of the division of labor.

But before going further, what is the division of labor? For the most part, we are talking about how work is organized among workers, organizations, and industries. Emile Durkheim (1997/1893) described the division of labor first appearing with farmers begetting bakers of bread and millers grinding wheat. He then showed how actual jobs were divided and organized so that they fit together in solidarity with the larger society. Adam Smith described the division of tasks involved with the making of such a minor item as a straight pin (obtaining wire, straightening it, cutting it, making a point, and putting a head on it). His description of the division of labor involves the organization of different tasks within the firm with greater specialization and repetition of tasks (1976/1776:8–9).¹ In fact, the Germans and many industrial engineers use the term “takt time” to refer to the length of a repetitive task (often about 90 to 120 seconds on an assembly line). But the division of labor also refers to reverse trends that bring more tasks together though job rotation and teamwork, so that it need not always be perceived negatively. In a sense, it refers to how the people in charge organize people to make things and deliver services. In most cases, it simply refers to dividing a project into smaller tasks, but it can also refer to the division of products between organizations (one firm makes pistons, another tie-rods, and an assembler puts them together as a car). Finally, it can refer to country-level divisions of labor where one country produces one product, and another country produces something different. This last point leads into many issues related to world trade and international politics, but every book must set some limits and we set ours here not going into the complexities of trade in the world system.² We stay focused on production.

Although we will deal with some politics, our presentation will concentrate on the distribution of tasks among workers and then add sections on politics for the end of various chapters. The division of labor has been seen as the fountain of progress, especially in earlier times, and a tsunami of boredom and alienation in many recent views. Marx viewed it as the source of inequality, and his followers have seen it as a plague descended upon the working people of the world with Taylorism and Fordism. But our focus will be on the division of work tasks in and between organizations for the most part. We leave the battles of empires and nation-states for another time.

We have entered into a new age of the division of labor. It is new not only because it is global, but also because production is organized with much more focus on flexibility and quality. Out of the many different conceptions of the new division of labor, this book will show that the present division of labor is best conceptualized as lean production and Toyotism with two lesser forms of lean production that we call Nikefication and Waltonism (Besser, 1996; Berggren, 1992, 1993). These processes have emerged from the old Taylorism and Fordism, surpassed a variety of competing ideas, and become part of the DNA of global production. So far, lean production has had a muted reception in the general social science literature as it is generally seen as a specialty of the business management and industrial engineering departments. We widen its application and show how it fits into both manufacturing and service industries.

The purpose of this short book is to discuss how different versions of the division of labor have emerged from the previous version of Taylorism and Fordism, and to focus on the muted reception that lean production has received in the sociological literature and among its gatekeepers. So we first review Fordism, then go to post-Fordism and flexible accumulation, review a number of firm or industry-named models (McDonaldization, Nikeification, Waltonism, Siliconism), examine the finance-inspired shareholder value theory, highlight lean production and Toyotism, and finish with the entirely new and emerging additive or sequential lamination technologies. We discuss which new models seem most appropriate to the present mixtures of flexible and outsourced division of labor.

Notes

  1   References to the division of labor are many in history including Plato, Xenophon, Ibn Khaldan, William Petty, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and so on. Historical examples of the assembly line also go far back to include the Venetian Arsenal, the Dutch Ship works, and Eli Whitney’s rifle assembly.

  2   World systems theory covers many of these political issues including war. Our focus will be on the organization of work rather than things like the battle for the core. However, in the last chapter we will look at world systems theory.

2

What Was the Old Division of Labor?

Abstract: This chapter describes the old models of division of labor that have dominated the twentieth century. It focuses on the principles of Taylorism / Scientific Management / Taylorism and Fordism / Mass Production and analyzes the complex intertwining of social and technical factors of these classical models of production.

Keywords: division of labor, Taylorism, Frederick Taylor, Fordism, Henry Ford

Janoski, Thomas and Lepadatu, Darina. Dominant Divisions of Labor: Models of Production That Have Transformed the World of Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137370235.

Taylorism and Fordism

Two men dominated the old division of labor. The first, Frederick Winslow Taylor, suffered headaches and poor eyesight so despite having passed the entrance exams to the Harvard Law School, he in 1874 became an apprentice patternmaker and machinist at a pump-making factory in Philadelphia. He went on to become what we would now call a management consultant to the Watertown Arsenal and Bethlehem Steel, and later a professor at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University. That he had poor eyesight is surprising since he and Clarence Clark won the 1881 doubles championship at what is now the U.S. Open, and 19 years later he finished fourth in golf at the 1900 Olympics in Paris. In any event, his unbounded enthusiasm in machinery and factories led to his development of the theory of scientific management. While the industrial revolution with theorization by Adam Smith’s pin-making principles and Emile Durkheim’s work on the division of labor came before what Taylor had done on the analysis of work, Taylor went further than them in specifying the division of labor’s components of time and motion studies and piecework (Kanigel, 1997).

The second, Henry Ford, grew up on a farm and although he had a basic education, he did not consider going to a university. Instead his early life was based on tinkering until he started work for Thomas Edison. This gave him a chance to develop his ideas about automobiles, which was a newly emerging technology of his time. He developed his ideas toward production on the basis of factories that he visited and also the disassembly processes at the Chicago stockyards. There is no evidence that Ford directly used any of Taylor’s ideas probably because Taylor died in 1915 at the early age of 59 when Ford’s influence was just beginning to climb. Taylor actually visited Ford’s early plant before the Rouge facility was build (Ford lived till 1947). Ford was a self-taught autodidact who relied more on observation than books and was even a bit antagonistic toward higher education (and also toward bankers, trade unions, and Jewish people) though he did establish the Ford Trade School. Examples of both assembly-lines and rational production existed as far back as the Venetian boat works, but Ford does not reference them and probably had only a passing knowledge of them at most because he was largely a self-made man (Ford, 1977, 1926).

So these two very different men are forever entwined as the two forceful personalities who shaped the modernist century of machine production in America and the rest of the world.

Taylorism and scientific management

In the Taylorism or scientific management approach, Frederick Taylor felt that the industrial order had been changed. In the past, man had been first, but in the future, the system must be first (Taylor, 1911:2). This system had four principles. First, Taylor’s engineers examined the work process in terms of how it was done. Using “time and motion studies,” they would study the job by replacing informal or rule-of-thumb methods with scientific study of actual job processes and methods based on the results of a scientific study of a job’s tasks. To do this, the engineers conducted experiments with the work process and developed more efficient ways of doing things including the physical movements of the body, thought processes of the mind, and also optimal rest periods. Finally, they would provide “detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task” (Montgomery, 1997: 250).

Second, the engineers, who later became human resources or personnel specialists, would scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves. They classified workers to see whether they fit the rigors or tedium of the work processes. One didn’t want workers whose abilities were limited and thus could not do the job, but they also didn’t want abilities to be too high so that workers would be bored with the job and want to do something else. Third, it targeted the wage system to create a payment system that strictly reinforced the optimal way of producing the product. Piecework wages were created that tied the number of products produced in an hour (or day) to increased wage rates if the worker exceeded a certain minimum. And fourth, it targeted the management system by dividing work nearly equally between different types of managers and clerks. The “foreman’s empire” of the late 1800s was an anathema to Taylor because the foreman was essentially a subcontractor who had total control of his piece of the workplace. Instead of this, Taylor divided management up into nine different types of bosses or clerks: the route clerk, the information card clerk, the time and cost clerk, the shop disciplinarian, the gang boss, the speed boss, the repair boss, the inspector, and the overforeman (human resources would evolve from some of the overforeman’s tasks). Of course, Taylor’s professional engineers also designed the whole process. This was called functional foremanship and to a large degree foresaw the functional divisionalization of organizations—separate supply, human resources, production, quality control, and many other departments—that became much common in the twentieth century.

The end result of Taylorism is the individualization of work so each worker has strong incentives to produce more products in order to get higher wages, and management controlled those incentives. It was a pure stimulus-response system that did not see work as existing beyond the immediate tasks before the worker. Engineers did the thinking about work techniques and designed the piecework system, and workers just followed orders.

While the Tayloristic system of scientific management might make sense from the perspective of a rare single-minded individual worker who wanted to make the most money possible, it didn’t work for most workers. First of all, Taylorism removed thinking from the workers’ purview and actually sought out dull workers.

One of the first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular operation is that he should be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. (Taylor 1911:59)

This was exemplified in Taylor’s testimony to Congress where he described the brawny Swede Schmidt who loaded pig iron.¹ He received 61% more pay for moving 362% more pig iron compared to the average worker. Schmidt’s case has become legendary, although the evidence shows that no other worker in history could break his record. Taylor’s assistants wrote that “other workers broke down after two or three days,” showing that Taylor’s methods were not so scientific after all (Kanigel, 1997). Although Taylor’s pig-iron experiments had proven to be seriously flawed (Wrege & Perroni 1974), Taylor made the point that a “first class worker” selected based on a scientific method can double or triple his productivity if properly motivated. Taylor didn’t care about dumbing the work down.

Second, the discovery of the informal group in the Hawthorne experiments at Western Electric showed that the social influence of the group had even more control over worker’s performance than manager’s exhortations or engineer’s piecework charts. Taylor’s theory had absolutely no conception of groups or norms except as a negative factor to be expunged. Third, Taylor thought workers would make more money under this system, but managers saw something else in the methods and pressured engineers to change the piecework rates so that when workers achieved high levels of production, the amount of money they actually received was ratcheted downward. Workers thought this was duplicitous and unfair, and labor conflicts led to Taylor’s testimony before Congress. Nonetheless, many firms gradually came to adopt many aspects of the Tayloristic processes of work design even if they didn’t always implement piecework.

While Taylor’s proposed principles of standardization and specialization had a tremendous impact on industrial productivity throughout the entire twentieth century, the basic premises of his managerial philosophy have been highly criticized from the beginning. The 1915 review conducted by Robert Hoxie, the special investigator for the US Commission on Industrial Relations of the House of Representatives, on Taylor’s management practices, revealed that scientific management was undemocratic because it did not involve workers in the fundamental parts of the production process, such as the setting of task, the wage rate, or the general conditions of employment (Hoxie, 1966). But owners and most managers could care less about workplace democracy. The other major complaints against scientific management allude to the fact that the obsession with efficiency overshadows the fundamental social aspect of work (Mintzberg, 1989) while the increased specialization leads to workers’ deskilling, degradation of work, and alienation (Braverman, 1974).

Fordism and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction to Divisions of Labor
• 2  What Was the Old Division of Labor?
• 3  New Models of the Division of LaborI
• 4  New Models of the Division of LaborII
• 5  Synthesizing Three Models of the Division of Labor
• 6  Conclusion: What the New Divisions of Labor Mean?
• References
• Person Index
• Subject Index