The division of labour and industrial diversity: flexibility and mass production in the French automobile industry

Abstract

Much of the debate about changing paradigms of production in industry has tended to oppose mass production to emerging forms of flexible, or network production. The debate over these competing visions is clouded by all manner of definitional ambiguities. In a given branch of production, the two strategies of mass and flexible production, and many intermediate forms of production organization, may coexist, because the branch ties together many different types of firms and different types of production units. This article develops a theoretical typology of different kinds of products and the production processes with which they are associated, and then deploys it in a case study of the French automobile industry in the 1980s. The branch is thus a complex structure of relationships between different firms and units and the different models of production organization they employ. Co-ordination of relationships between different approaches to production is a key to successful branch governance, and to emerging...