American Mass Production and the Dawn of Italian Mass Culture

Managerial strategies must be coherent with the market environment and social context of the firm: the type of coherence between these three dimensions of employment relations — market, organisation, community — defines a model of the firm. Now that the death of Taylorist and Fordist (mass production) models has been proclaimed, who is (or are) the winner(s) among all the candidates analysed in the economic literature during the 1980s? According to Appelbaum and Batt (1994), five models have been proposed as ‘alternatives to the mass-production model of work organisation and industrial relations’: the American human resources model; the Swedish socio-technical model; the Japanese lean production model; the Italian flexible specialisation model; and the German diversified quality production model. Applebaum and Batt consider that each of these models represents a relatively coherent set of principles and institutions that organise the four dimensions of a firm’s labour policy: management methods (including participative devices), work organisation, human resource practices and industrial relations. Each model has specific comparative advantages, the nature of which depends (among other things) on the market environment of the firm. In reality these theoretical models hardly ever appear in a pure form, even in their country of origin.

“Reign of the Robots”: The Homer Laughlin China Company and Flexible Mass Production REGINA LEE BLASZCZYK In 1936, a trade journalist writing for Ceramic Industry described recent technological innovations at Homer Laughlin China Company of Newell, West Virginia. The writer asserted that the craft potter “of poem, drama, and tale” was disappearing during “a new regime of push-button, sprocket, and bearing”; the artisan’s realm had been invaded by “automatons” that were “streaked with flashes of electric­ ity and backed with subtle overtones of science and research.” Among the many awe-inspiring devices was a new glazing machine, which was designed to eliminate the hazardous, time-consuming manual task of dipping ware into vats of lead glaze. Instead, a ribbon belt conveyor fed plates through a spray booth, flipped them over, and sprayed them on the reverse at a “breathless” rate of 150 pieces per minute. Another appliance, the Iron Horse, moved people, supplies, and products in the name of efficient kiln management. At Homer Laughlin, the mesmerized journalist contended, the “reign of the robots” had begun.1 Ceramic Industry’s hyperbolic story announced major technical changes along Fordist lines at the world’s largest pottery. Long estabDr . Blaszczyk is assistant professor in the Department of History and the Program in American Studies at Boston University. A version of this article presented at the 1993 meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Washington, D.C., won SHOT’S Robinson Prize. The author thanks David A. Hounshell, Anne M. Boylan, Glenn Porter, Philip Scranton, Susan H. Myers, Steven Lubar, Bonnie Lilienfeld, and Lindy Biggs for assisting with this article in innumerable ways. Special thanks go to executives at the Homer Laughlin China Company, including Marcus Aaron II, Joseph M. Wells III, Joseph M. Wells, Jr., Jonathan O. Parry, and Ken McElhaney, who generously provided access to their factories, staff, and archives, to Carl C. Mooney and Willis G. Gaston, who shared their knowledge of mechanical engineering in the pottery industry, and to archivists at Kent State University. '“Reign of the Robots,” Ceramic Industry “¿I (December 1936): 408-13; Walter How­ ard Emerson, “We Move the Work and the Worker,” Ceramic Industry 23 (September 1934): 138-42, on the Iron Horse.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/95/3604-0006$01.00 863 864 Regina Lee Blaszczyk lished as the American ceramics industry’s low-cost, high-volume pro­ ducer, Homer Laughlin’s reputation for innovation was virtually un­ rivaled among tableware manufacturers at home or abroad. This West Virginia firm was among a handful of American potteries spe­ cializing in quantity production and experimenting with massproduction methods at a moment when many contemporaries still exclusively used conventional batch-production techniques. The com­ pany survived by catering to working-class and middle-class con­ sumers who acquired their household ceramics as premiums with purchases of packaged cereal, from mail-order catalogs, or at hve-anddime stores. Serving mass retailers and their customers was the name of the game at Homer Laughlin. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the firm’s managers undertook an expansion and renova­ tion program designed to strengthen their alliances with mass mer­ chandisers and to safeguard their reputation as potters to “Her Maj­ esty—The American Housewife.”2 With the objective of meeting the demand for more goods and varied goods, Homer Laughlin’s manag­ ers selectively introduced Fordist methods to their Ohio River valley industrial site, deliberately shielding certain craft operations against mechanization. For decades, historians of manufacturing focused their studies on companies and industries that fit Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.’s paradigm of big business wherein mass- and other quantity-production prac­ tices represent a pinnacle of technological achievement.3 But in the 1980s, with the automobile industry in financial straits, scholars from various disciplines—economists, business theorists, sociologists, and historians—began challenging the dominant model of big business and mass production. Leading the quest for new approaches to busi­ ness organization and manufacturing technologies, labor economist 2Joe Dickey, “Industrial Welfare Department, Homer Laughlin China Company,” Potters' Herald (East Liverpool, Ohio) (January 22, 1925), p. 4. In claiming the patron­ age of “The American...

The macroeconomics of Model T

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences

The purpose of the work is to analyze the repeatability of elastic damping properties of multilayered corrugated supports of aircraft and rocket engines in the conditions of out-of-toleranceproduction of component parts in mass production. The research is carried out by the calculation Monte-Carlo method with the use of experimentally confirmed laws of distribution of tolerances on the production of parts constituting the structure of a support. A mathematical model of virtual mass production of supports with multilayered corrugated dampers, a mathematical model of uniaxial static loading of a support, and, on their basis, a model of elastic hysteresis characteristics spread have been developed. Fields of dispersion of characteristics of supports have been investigated for different parameters of accuracy of production of the parts influencing the above characteristics. It has been found that statistical laws of distribution of elastic friction characteristics of multilayered dampers in supports are not subject to the normal law. The most probable values of these characteristics are 20-30% less than the arithmetic mean values calculated for the whole amount of sampling. The calculations showed that in common production practice of combination of tolerances on the production of damper component parts in mass production the variation of their characteristics is not unconsiderable, which results in the need of selection of parts with the required characteristics.

Today, culture and art industry have expanded and diversified thanks to the increasing interest and demand for culture and art products in the world. As a result, a structure, which comprises conventional components of marketing, has emerged in order to fulfill this demand and bring together the products of art and their target market. As an element of the culture and art industry, cinema industry constitutes an important part of everyday life. Cinema has gone through technological advancements and has become an industry, which feeds many different lines of business. This chapter examines the movie industry, which has an evolving and diversifying structure and which is considered an important element of the art and culture industry. The aim of this research is to create a theoretical structure between the relationship of marketing and the movie industry, especially at the point where the movie industry brings the audiences together.

Globalization is now linked to economic advancement; the position of Nigeria in this regard through the creative and cultural industries is not in doubt. This paper attempted to create awareness on the place of Nigeria in the global creative and cultural industries. It is of the essence to create consciousness in this neglected area by the government and entrepreneurs alike, hence the contributions in these sectors of economic development of the country go unrecognized. Thus, this paper did a study of the position of Nigeria music and film industries in the planetary space and contributions to the national economy. It was observed that Nigeria occupies an enviable location in the global index in these areas, though there are no clear policies in these lucrative fields. Regardless of the neglect, the creative and cultural industries have managed to fill a position in the world through the individual persistence of the practitioners. This study created awareness on the carelessness of that sector and the need for all to pay attention to enable Nigeria to sustain her position in this ever-expanding and lucrative sector. Keywords: Globalization; entrepreneurs; cultural creative industries DOI: 10.7176/JCSD/63-06 Publication date: February 28 th 2021

New media is the most important mode of modern communication, it is kind of affective computing for happiness detection. The Frankfurt School proposes "cultural industry", which means "cultural and creative industry", and is strongly promoted all over the world. With the progress of new media communication and the trend of globalization, the film industry has a high value and high investment efficiency ratio. Through the analysis of the China film "Hi, Mon" and the Taiwan film "Our Times" in the global box office. With the development of new media big data research, the intersection of new media and box office research, it is possible to learn the importance of the collective memory of society to the society after it is reproduced in the film, thus exploring the meaning of film and cultural communication in the cultural and creative industry.

Convolutional neural network is a deep learning network, which is more suitable for image and speech processing. Image classification is one of the main research areas of visual artificial intelligence, with many applications, such as scene detection and robot vision enhancement. This paper proposes a new convolutional neural network to evaluate the potential of mangrove wetlands and discusses the development of the network in the film and television cultural and creative industries. Mangrove wetland is a special type of marine wetland centered on mangrove plant communities in tropical and subtropical coasts and intertidal zones of estuaries. They play an important role and play an important role in providing food, protecting wild germplasm resources, and population survival. Over the years, due to population pressure and economic development, the quality of mangrove wetlands has declined, the area has shrunk, and the restoration of mangrove wetlands has become a global hot spot. The development of the film and television industry is an important way to promote China’s cultural innovation. It is essential for strengthening the country’s soft power and improving China’s international image. However, due to the influence of many factors, the development of China’s film and television cultural creation industry is slow, and the development process is lagging behind. In recent years, the country has considered the development level of the cultural industry as an important development strategy, and has been taking various measures to promote the development of the film and television cultural industry. The creative film and television industry should be aware of its responsibility for cultural dissemination, actively learn from foreign industry development experience, and explore a scientific development system that meets China’s development needs and actual national conditions.

A Risky Business? The Role of Incentives and Runaway Production in Securing a Screen Industries Production Base in Scotland

Managing the large-scale restructuring away from the previously established resource-wasting industrial mass production and consumption model towards a socially balanced and resource-efficient economy requires an adaptation of interest reconciliation mechanisms, including also new strategic approaches by the main actors. As we are speaking of a transition towards a new model, the role of actors is essential, even if, in most of the climate-change literature, there is scant consideration or analysis of the actors, their interests, and their ideas. The basic question is not simply how ‘civil issues’ can be integrated into the established forms of social dialogue and how trade unions will need to adapt their agenda accordingly, but, more fundamentally, whether these structures are capable of giving a boost to a true paradigm shift in overcoming the unsustainable production model. In other words, are trade unions and social dialogue structures indeed ‘locked into’ this production model, and, if not, what is the way forward? We will examine in this article how dialogue structures and key actors develop new strategies and live up to new challenges in the context of sustainable development. After framing the main context of the climate-change debate in the first section, we present a critical view of the ‘capital–labour’ deal as it was established in the post-WW2 period. In the third section we put forward three main arguments as to how and why trade unions and social dialogue structures are actually in a position to take up broader issues, expand the dialogue, and move away from the resource-wasting consumer-industrial production model. We also show how the trade union movement – at its different organisational levels – takes up this narrative. This is a historical process entailing pitfalls and contradictions, in so far as the broader societal role of trade unions has no obvious roots in their origins and early history. Becoming involved in the great societal challenges of mankind, as in the exemplary case of the paradigm shift in production and consumer patterns of industrial society, may be liable to occasional tensions with their original membership-focused approach. The strategic considerations, on the other hand, of how the transformation to a low-carbon economy should be managed and how its unavoidable costs should be distributed (among employers, employees, the state and consumers) are issues more in line with their traditional role. Contradictions and differing visions necessarily appear also between different organisational levels of the trade union movement.

In Europe, the history of the car industry and the evolution of marketing strategies took a very different course compared to the one taken in the U.S. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Europe was influenced by Ford’s model of mass production, yet maintained a tradition of craftsman-like automobile manufacturing which, to a certain extent, still persists to this day in the manufacture of luxury models and sports cars. Cars were mainly produced on a commission basis. They were an object of pleasure rather than of utility. There were few in circulation. Competitions triggered desires that only rich people were in a position to satisfy, and they chose the best manufacturers. During the 1930s, two trends emerged that left a lasting mark on Europe: a strong company identity and an indirect rivalry between products by the same manufacturer. In marketing, this was a period of design continuity by a single producer, and of a relentless search for beauty and diversity in terms of the visual. In those years, the main factors that influenced marketing were the emergence of new technologies, economic development (growing average income per capita), and the beginnings of mass consumption. Above all, though, it was influenced by the capacity of new entrepreneurs to understand the trends of potential demand and to draw upon technological and management knowledge tested and developed in other industries too.

This chapter examines the history of the mass production system in the manufacturing and service industries in the U.S. The mass production model's triumph first came with its application in the armaments industry during World War 2, this was followed by its application in the consumer economy in the late 1940s and the 1950s and the renewal of the mass production model by Japanese manufacturers in the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter contends that the roots of mass production run deep in American history and the early wave of mass production was not confined to the commanding heights of the American industry.

Taiwan's small to the medium-sized traditional manufacturing industry is generally believed to have flourished in the 1970s due to the encouragement of the government to promote turning family living rooms into factories. With the hardworking attitude, these small factories were able to accumulate tiny good results and to converge into a significant force. Gradually, these family factories began to grow stronger, and they tried desperately to increase their productivity. They began to follow the model of standardization and mass production. However, did everything possible to reduce costs and to improve international competitiveness? In the study, we used Y Factory as an example to figure out their difficulties and achievements.

A Study on the Effect of Industry Organizational Culture on Job Attitude of Organizational Employees – Comparison Between the Semiconductor and the Automobile Industries