The Italian Alternative: Flexible Organization and Social Management

Abstract

Since the beginning of this century, industrial organization in the Western world has been dominated by ideas, principles, and values developed primarily in the United States. The startling success of mass production techniques, exemplified by the Ford assembly lines of the T car and used throughout American industry to help the American war effort in the last World War, were compelling reasons for the spread of an American model of industrial organization based on large-scale, mass-producing, integrated firms. Speaking of an American is, of course, an oversimplification. For a long time (and even now), for example, large industrial firms supplying mass markets have coexisted with small firms supplying limited market niches (Granovetter, 1984) in what has been called dualism (Berger and Piore, 1980). Yet the contribution of small firms to the American economy is quite limited. Only 25.3 percent of its industrial labor force worked in plants with less than one hundred employees in 1977, compared to 58.4 percent in Japan, in 1978 (Granovetter, 1984) and 50.5 percent in Italy, in 1971 (Weiss, 1984). It is also the mass-scale of production that was (and still is) idealized by many economists as the modern sector of the industry as opposed to the traditional sector of small firms. And it is the modern rather than the traditional sector that has typically attracted most of the interest of teachers and researchers of management and organization. The is driven by the basic value of rational, economic efficiency achieved by the systematic application of Adam Smith's principles of division of labor, specialization, and standardization, which were refined by Taylor early in this century. The application of these values and principles had several consequences. It led to a search for mass markets, which was helped by the standardization of consumers' tastes (Sabel and Zeitlin, 1982), and the development of railroads (Chandler, 1977). There was a drive toward vertical integration to control supplies and distribution. There was also a drive on the part of management to control more and more a labor force reluctant to accept the de-skilling inherent in Smith and Taylor's principles (Noble, 1986).