The Japanization of Fordism

Japan, or more specifically its management methods, has increasingly entered debates about work organization in the 1980s. In so doing it also began to play an important role in the wider Post-Fordist debates about transformations in production regimes and even societies in general. At one extreme Post-Fordists see the Japanese management model as prototypical of the new flexible era they are heralding. At the other extreme Williams et al. have begun to see the Japanese experience as providing significant fuel to their more general questioning of the whole Fordist conceptual edifice which underlies Post-Fordist theses. The argument of this paper suggests that the Japanese model does expose problems of certain concepts of Fordism, particularly the blanket association of Fordist mass production with inflexibility. However, at the labour process level, the Japanese model rests on the fundamental bedrock of Fordism work study, assembly lines, and mass production and marketing. It nevertheless reverses certain features of Fordism particularly by involving workers more in conception than did conventional Taylorism. As such it represents an evolution within Fordism rather than transformation of it, i.e. neo- Fordism not Post-Fordism. Though it is common to incorrectly identify Fordism with rigidity, this alone is not necessary justification for either abandoning it as a useful concept or dismissing its relevance in the context of Japanese management. The author concludes we should settle for a fairly exclusive definition of Fordism, see the issue as one of developing new concepts of it, and above all else not expect Fordism to carry a bigger theoretical burden than it can.