From Fordism to post-Fordism: historical developments and the influence of the Italian case in international debate

Abstract

The main theme of the thesis is the reconstruction of the debate on mass production and Fordism in the twentieth century, when the crisis of the "Fordist" development model led to the rediscovery of alternative production systems, in particular of the so-called "flexible specialization". The first part is dedicated to the historical reconstruction of some fundamental events for the articulation of the debate: the birth of mass production in the USA and the contextual emergence of the modern managerial enterprise, the formation of the Fordist ideology, and the transmission in Western Europe of economic principles underlying the "American model". The fundamental junction of the thesis is constituted by the analysis of the Italian economic and industrial context. This analysis aims, on the one hand, to highlight the difficulties of applying the "American model" in Italy, and on the other, to retrace the steps that led in the 1970s to the rediscovery within the national territory of a dense network of small and medium-sized enterprises with peculiar characteristics.In the last part, the main topic will be the analysis of the contributions of economists and business historians to the research, in the present and in history, of alternative manufacturing methodologies to mass production, and of alternative development models to Fordism. Finally, the consequences of this debate from the 1990s to the present days will be highlighted.