“Fordism” is the catchword usually associated with relations between the corporation, labor and government in the postwar period and, more generally, with the supposed social compact arising from the very structure of mass production and its virtuous circle with mass consumption. In this wider sense, Fordism has often been coupled, sometimes overlapped, with Keynesian macroeconomics, government economic interventionism, and the welfare state. The course aims at disentangling this seemingly simple notion of “Fordism” by tracing its manifold history and international circulation, by comparing different national roads to mass production, and by analyzing the evolution and interplay of different, often antagonistic, actors and processes: big business and the labor movement, technical change and the increase in consumption.
Class 1. The US and the World
Suggested Readings:
- Henry Ford (with Samuel Crowther), My Life and Work, Doubleday 1923, chapter 7, The Terror of the Machine, pp. 103-115
- Elizabeth Esch, The Color Line and the Assembly Line. Managing Race in the Ford Empire, University of California Press 2018, Introduction, pp. 1-21
Class 2. Productivity and Crisis in Europe in the Interwar Period
Suggested Readings:
- Antonio Gramsci, excerpts from Americanism and Fordism, from the Prison Notebooks, in The Gramsci Reader, Selected Writings 1916-1935, edited by David Forgacs, New York University Press 2000, pp. 275-299 [in Italian: Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana, Einaudi 1975, pp. 2137-2181]
- Charles S. Maier, Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s, «Journal of Contemporary History», 5, 2, 1970, pp. 27-61
Class 3. Postwar, 1
Suggested Readings:
- Walter P. Reuther, Practical Aims and Purposes of American Labor, «The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science», vol. 274, March 1951, Labor in the American Economy, pp. 64-74
- Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, Harvard University Press 2006, pp. 345-359
Class 4. Postwar, 2
Suggested Readings:
- Walt Whitman Rostow, The stages of economic growth. A non-communist manifesto, 1960, chapter 2, The Five Stages of Growth - A Summary, pp. 4-16 (3rd edition, Cambridge UP)
- Valentina Fava, Luminita Gatejel, East–West cooperation in the automotive industry: Enterprises, mobility, production, «The Journal of Transport History», 38, 1, 2017, pp. 1–9