Flexible Production, Rigid Jobs: Lessons from the Clothing Industry

Ian M. Taplin

58 citations0/0 files storedWork and Occupations

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies Management Theory and Practice Digital Economy and Work Transformation

Abstract

Contextualized in the debate on the nature of post-Fordism, this study looks at changes in work organization that accompany firm attempts to increase their competitive position. It argues that changes in the technical and social relations of production in a labor intensive industry simply amount to labor intensification. Firms achieve productivity and quality improvements plus manufacturing flexibility by using new technology to deskill or replace skilled workers and by reconfiguring work to maximize work effort by semiskilled workers. These technological changes and work reorganization permit manufacturing flexibility but in ways that resemble modifications of Fordism rather than a new production paradigm.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 58 citations exist upstream.

References

1978Men and Women of the Corporation 1992The machine that changed the world 1985The Second Industrial Divide 2020The Condition of Postmodernity 2019The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism 1989Postfordism in question 1987The Uncertainties of Management in the Management of Uncertainty: Employers, Labor Relations and Industrial Adjustment in the 1980s 1987The Deskilling Controversy

Cited by

2021Working Still Harder 2006Trust, conflict and cooperative behaviour 2006Strategic change and organisational restructuring: How managers negotiate change initiatives 2004Does Modern Organization and Governance Threat Solidarity?1999Effects of world class manufacturing on shop floor workers 1998The Effects of Job Characteristics on Active Effort at Work 2008A Cross-National Analysis of Job Quality Characteristics and Perceived Job Satisfaction in a Changing World Economy: Implications for Public Administrators Managing a Multicultural Workforce

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.