Today, business organizations are further improving their business and marketing strategies to become established permanently in the market. Many organizations spend a good deal of time, energy and money to come up with solutions, which will help increase their sales and profit from their consumers. Good business and marketing strategies serve as a basis for the success of a business organization in the market, and somehow determine the building up of their brand image and brand loyalty.
However, the success of a business organization is not only dependent on its ability to come up with good and effective business and marketing strategies. In addition to these is the ability of the company to produce high quality products, which determines their brand image. Production is also a basis for the company to gauge market penetration and establishment, for in general, the increase in production means the increase in the demand for the product, which results to increase in the company's profit and growth. Production is important, for its increase indicates the continuous patronage of consumers for the products of the company, and its success in providing good solutions and services for the consumers. With this importance, it is best to analyze and evaluate the two different production systems, namely, the Fordist production system and the lean production system. This paper will discuss the two systems separately, their traits, advantages and disadvantages, and the characteristics of jobs under the two production systems. In addition, this paper will also tackle the consequences for employees, given the spread of lean production as the dominant paradigm for the production of goods and services.
Fordist Production System
Fordism, or the collective term for the social institutions of mass production, began to emerge in the United States early in the twentieth century and were at the center of a decades-long process of social struggle, which extended into the immediate post-World War II era (Rupert 2006). Through intensified exploration of labor, the system of Fordist mass production might counter capitalism's endemic tendency toward a falling rate of profit, for the institutionalization of such a system of production required a combination of force and persuasion: a political regime in which trade unions would be subdued, workers might be offered a higher real standard of living, and the ideological legitimation of this new kind of capitalism would be embodied in cultural practices and social relations extending far beyond the workplace (Rupert 2006). The Cold War ideology or Communism, played a crucial role in the political stabilization of Fordist institutions in the United States. This ideology provided the common ground for the de-radicalization of industrial labor unions that could be incorporated as junior partners in a coalition of globally oriented social forces working together to rebuild the “free world” along liberal capitalist lines and to resist the infringement of a presumed Communist menace locally and globally (Rupert 2006). In addition, institutionalized Fordism, enabled the United States to contribute to almost half of the world's industrial production in the immediate postwar years. It provided the economic dynamism needed to initiate reconstruction of the major capitalist countries after the Second World War, to support the emergence of both the consumer society and the military-industrial complex in the postwar United States (Rupert 2006).
It has been reported that in a Fordist production system, the integration of the industrial system is often discontinuous and subject to delays in the transport chain ('Fluxes in a Fordist and a Post-Fordist Production System' 2006). Links between different functions generally imply an accumulation of stocks, such as raw materials, parts and manufactured goods, before their usage, including processing, manufacturing and distribution. The high outputs of an assembly line require warehousing of all required parts in the vicinity, and this cannot occur without stable and constant demand, which is assumed to absorb a supply-oriented production. The transport function in the Fordist production system is massively applying economies of scale with accumulation and delays at break and bulk points ('Fluxes in a Fordist and a Post-Fordist Production System' 2006). On the other hand, in a post-fordist production system, it tends to reduce warehousing and increase the integration between elements of the production system in a complex network of relationships, and this environment, the transport function is closely integrated to the production and the distribution and is the main element in minimizing delays and warehousing ('Fluxes in a Fordist and a Post-Fordist Production System' 2006).
It has been reported that Fordism refers to the system of mass production and consumption characteristic of highly developed economies during the 1940s to 1960s (Thompson 2006). This system carried an extreme division of labor, making the role of the assembly worker had the lowest status in the factory. Moreover, assembly line work is unpleasant in a mass production environment, is physically demanding, requires high levels of concentration, and is excruciatingly boring. As an example, the Ford Motor Company experienced a very high labor turnover, and according to facts, men work in Ford for only two reasons, one is for wages, and the other is for fear of losing their jobs (Thompson 2006). Moreover, Fordist production processes increase the speed of work and production, but depend on endless repetition of highly specialized tasks, so the workers often do not learn a productive range of skills, thus, Fordist product processes may limit an industry's flexibility in adapting to changing markets (Saez and Heintz 2006). Today, this model is represented by those companies, which adhere to the basic principles of Ford's assembly line, but still feel the need to introduce new principles in order to respond to competitive pressure, for under the Fordist model operators were low-skilled, specializing in one job with poor career prospects, and only relief workers were multi-skilled ('The Social and Labor Impact of Globalization in the Manufacture of Transport Equipment' 2000).
