Constructing Working Selves: Silicon Valley Assemblers Meet the New Work Order

Abstract

E arly in twentieth-century America, Henry Ford, that famous industrialist and manufacturer of the Model-T, is said to have claimed: am more a manufacturer of men than of automobiles' (Schwartz 1971). And indeed, one arm of the early Ford Motor Company took as its purpose adapting an immigrant workforce to new conditions of production. By the second decade of the 1900's, work at the Ford factory had become synonymous with assembly-line mass production and required of workers minimal skills and decreased mechanical know-how. Nonetheless, with the demand for the Model-T growing, worry abounded that the available immigrant workforce from southern and eastern Europe was too undisciplined, too unreliable, too inefficient to succeed at the factory regimen (Meyer 1980). These workers needed to be recast, thought Ford—transformed morally and socially, made fit for a new work order. And thus were born several ambitious educational and socialization programs for Ford workers, programs that taught virtues such as timeliness, cleanliness, thrift, self-discipline, regularity'' (Meyer 1980: 75).