Conclusion
Fordism refers to the system of mass production and consumption characteristic of highly developed economies during the 1940s-1960s. Henry Ford was once a popular symbol of the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial, mass production, mass consumption economy.
Ford was the creative force behind the growth to preeminence of the automobile industry, still the world's largest manufacturing activity. As Womack, Jones, and Roos (1990: 11) explain: "Twice in this century (the auto industry) has changed our most fundamental ideas about how we make things. And how we make things dictates not only how we work but what we buy, how we think, and the way we live."
The first of these transformations was from craft production to mass production. This helped to create the market as we know it, based on economies of scale and scope, and gave rise to giant organizations built upon functional specialization and minute division of labour.
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