The Spread of the New Model of Production—A Halting Transformation of the Structures of Work

Abstract

The project 'Trend Report on concepts and processes of rationalization in the automobile industry, the tool industry and chemistry*' is supported by the Verbund Sozialwissenschaftiiche Technikforschung [Union of Social Sci ence Research on Technology]. In addition to the usual intensive studies with their mix of methods, in which the central pilot projects of plant rationalization are taken up in their deep structure (conceptions of rationalization; the labor situations in the newly-formed areas of implementation; how the employed worker understands work, the firm, and rationalization), we are also carrying out new latitudinal inquiries (inventories based on a typology of work) in which we take up important basic structures of industrial labor assumed to be represen tative of the different branches. The requirement of a latitudinal inquiry con strained us to an extremely limited program of inquiry for this empirical part of the study. We concentrated on the dimensions of and of skills required, which are especially important for an analysis of rationalization. To classify jobs we distinguished four types along the axis technical level of manu facture and the chosen as regards the organization of labor: manual laborer working with the product (in pre-mechanized manufacture); manual laborer on machines (in mechanized or partially automated manufacturing, ac cording to the solution as regards the organization of labor); machine operator (in mechanized manufacture, without automated process manage ment); system regulator (in [partially] automated manufacturing with program