Are The British Bad at Flexible Manufacturing?

Abstract

Although the argument will review a good deal of contemporary and historical research data, it is not to be thought of as an empirical undertaking. It is mainly an exercise in secondary interpretation or meta‐analysis, in which findings and propositions produced by a variety of writers for a variety of audiences is reworked and re‐presented. The paper starts from the problems of contemporary manufacturing in Britain. As one authority has recently suggested: “The relatively weak performance of British firms in international markets for technologically sophisticated products in…electrical machinery and engineering products is an acknowledged fact” (Balasubramanyam, 1994. See also Coates, 1994; Ackroyd and Whittaker, 1990). In this paper it is taken as self‐evident that the successful manufacturing firm must deploy in the market high quality and differentiated products at competitive prices. The main part of the answer of how to do this under current market conditions is equally plain: it involves innovating new products, adapting product lines rapidly and, when required, increasing (and, if necessary) decreasing the scale of productive operations. The word which best sums up these requirements for successful manufacturing in current market conditions, is flexibility. Whilst we would agree that the Atkinson model of the flexible firm is based on inadequate research and inadequate analysis, against the view of some other commenta‐tors (see, in particular, Pollert, 1991), it seems to us that the question of flexibility is worth considering in more depth (see also Procter, et al, 1994). The question with which this paper is concerned is: to what extent can the British achieve flexible manufacturing?