Re: Book announcement

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 14 Nov 1997, Hsin-Hsing Chen wrote:

> ...But the idea of the FMS is NOT
> "laborless production system" in today's business-school textbook. Instead,
> it is even more "labor intensive," in terms of the importance of human
> intervention in the production process, than the comic-book version of
> Fordist assembly line. Small batch manufacturing is the key. Exactly because
> model change and task adjustments are constant affairs, direct workers'
> intelligent initiatives are crucial for those kinds of production. That's
> one reason why "human relations" talks are in fashion in today's business
> schools.

Yes, this is especially the case in East Asia and Central Europe, where
Fordism on the American model never really took off, and which
industrialized on the model of small-lot, high-volume global
market niches. Taiwan's computer industry is basically a tightly organized
network of "flexible producers", who do the actual production for
computer equipment sold by Dell and Gateway; finance and marketing are
centralized by the Nationalist developmental state, but workplace skills
and supply lines are decentralized and disseminated on a wide scale,
thus creating an incredibly efficient and durable industrial base. The
Swiss and Baden-Wurttemberg machine-tools industries seem to be based on
similar principles, i.e. consistent and efficient state intervention on
the level of training, networking, long-term developmental finance and
whatnot (especially from state-owned regional banks). In turn, Central
Europe has been a hotbed of ideas for humanization of the workplace, team
production, breaking down assembly lines into point-and-source production
and whatnot, often under the aegis of powerful unions (e.g. IG Metall).
Though unions are pretty weak in Taiwan, they do exist, and it'll be
interesting to see how the politics of the informatic factory-floor play
out in Taipei.

-- Dennis