Jim Devine writes:
I'm not convinced. The "Fordist" production techniques that prevailed
before the
neoliberal or Post-Fordist era involved large economies of scale. Though
the companies
benefited from protection (and it seems to be true that international
direct investment
used to be mostly behind tariff and non-tariff barriers), this meant
that they suffered
from relatively high costs, because of the limited markets behind the
barriers. In some
ways, the new "flexible" technology of the neoliberal era fits with
these barriers
_better_, because economies of scale aren't as important.
###
That's so if you accept the old Piore/Sabel view that flexible
technologies would obviate economies of scale. I don't think there's
much evidence that they have. If you want a touching account of Piore's
fruitless search for such evidence, see:
Piore, Michael J, "Corporate Reform in American Manufacturing and the
Challenge to Economic Theory," in (T. J. Allen and M. S. Scott Morton,
eds.) Information Technology and the Corporation of the 1990s: Research
Studies . New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
What he found, interviewing executives of a number of companies
undergoing 'restructuring', was that they were incurring huge new fixed
costs in the form of software to manage their new flexible systems.
Flexible, yes; small and specialized, no. He tries hard to get them to
talk flexible specialization, and they won't go there.
Jim continues:
I would guess that the fall of the ISI model had a lot to do with the
the internal limits
of that model, e.g., the inability to take advantage of economies of
scale and the
encouragement of "X inefficiency" by limits on competition, and also the
governments'
usual unwillingness to complete the model by widening internal markets
via land reform and
the like. The popular discontent that motivated bourgeois governments to
engage in such
populist policies also faded, at least in its ability to shake up the
incumbent political
class.
###
My point is that this sort of analysis is ahistorical. The 'model' was
not a piece of clockwork that wound down, but something specific to a
system of production. It's easy in retrospect to think of ISI (or any
defunct system) as one with great internal weaknesses, but it actually
worked reasonably well in a number of countries, and now it's virtually
and rather suddenly gone.
-Fred
--
Frederick Guy
Department of Management
School of Management and Organizational Psychology
Birkbeck College
Malet St.
London WC1E 7HX
+44 [0] 20 7631 6773
+44 [0] 20 7631 6769 (fax)
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