THE JAPANIZATION OF FORDISM

Japan, or more specifically its management methods, has increasingly e ntered debates about work organization in the 1980s. In so doing it al so began to play an important role in the wider Post-Fordist debates a bout transformations in production regimes and even societies in gener al. 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 p roviding significant fuel to their more general questioning of the who le Fordist conceptual edifice which underlies Post-Fordist theses. The argument of this paper suggests that the Japanese model does expose p roblems of certain concepts of Fordism, particularly the blanket assoc iation of Fordist mass production with inflexibility. However, at the labour process level, the Japanese model rests on the fundamental bedr ock of Fordism - work study, assembly lines, and mass production and m arketing. It nevertheless reverses certain features of Fordism particu larly by involving workers more in conception than did conventional Ta ylorism. 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 n ot necessary justification for either abandoning it as a useful concep t or dismissing its relevance in the context of Japanese management. T he author concludes we should settle for a fairly exclusive definition of Fordism, see the issue as one of developing new concepts of it, an d above all else not expect Fordism to carry a bigger theoretical burd en than it can.