How useful was the concept of fordism to understanding patterns of social, political and economic development in post war modern societies.
Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor company in 1903. In 1908 the company initiated the production of the Model-T (of which the company sold 15 million). It was the first car of its kind using a new type of production which involved the mass production of consumer durables which were made on moving assembly live techniques operated with the semi-skilled labor of the mass worker. Before cars were produced by hand which was both time consuming and very expensive. The actual physical production of the car was also a problem due to numerous parts involved, the Model-T took only 12.5 hours per car to build from start to finish, a build time that would have been impossible to sustain on a continuous basis before.
It was from this new process of the production line that Fordism took its name; he had come up with a way of producing cars that broke the overall production process down into hundreds and sometimes thousands of small, individualized, highly-specialized parts. By introducing a complex division of labor, ford reasoned that costs could be lowered and profits increased. The production was a new way of thinking and doing, helped made possible by new advances in machinery.
This new Fordism changed the economic word drastically. People were not people anymore but merely things to help the machines work. Despite current claims that fordism constituted "a real innovation", or that it introduced "a new epoch of the capitalist mode of production", Theo Nicholes more critically said that "it introduced a new method of control over labour power, and that it introduced the "flow line". This labor control and flow line are what made such a dramatic change on the world in the post war period and still now. The assembly line had many positive and negative affects on society.