Taylorism
The U.S. motor vehicle industry emerged at the end of the 19th century
as a craft production system, with a workforce that was mainly comprised of
skilled craftspeople who understood mechanical design principles and the
materials they worked with. Many of the more experienced craftspeople
became independent contractors working inside the factory. After World
War I, however, Henry Ford invented the mass production system (now
known as Fordism). In his system, the product, the production process, and
the tasks that each particular worker performed were all standardized.
At roughly the same time, Frederick Winslow Taylor developed an
approach to scientific management (now known as Taylorism), that divided
management tasks that required intelligence (such as planning and control)
from standardized repetitive production tasks that required minimal
qualifications. As a consequence of this division, management came to
consider the workforce as comprising variable costs, and as a result was
always trying to reduce these costs to improve the company’s bottom line.
The mass production system inspired by Ford and Taylor was responsible
for the extraordinary success of the U.S. motor vehicle companies up to
1955.
The Japanese and the Europeans followed Ford and Taylor´s ideas but
where faced with the realization that due to its dead-end monotony the
mass production system was unbearable for the workers, and so they
developed different approaches to the mass production system. In Japan
after World War II, Eiji Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno developed the Toyota
Production System (TPS) that later became known as the lean production
system. Toyota considered workers as fixed costs and continuously
enhanced their workers’ skill to derive ongoing benefits from their seniority
in the form of knowledge, experience, and commitment. The Europeans, faced with the same dissatisfaction from their assembly line workers, also...