Postfordism

Definition

Postfordism names the emerging regime of capitalist development that succeeded the Fordist–Keynesian postwar boom — the dominant trope of the industrial-urbanist discourse on the postmetropolis. Soja's careful definition dismantles the term's misreadings by taking it apart: the ford- root "emphatically expresses the centrality of industrial production and captures as well as any other trope the hegemonic economic system and social contract that most powerfully propelled the postwar boom" (Gramscian roots; the automobile's iconic power); the post- prefix denotes "neither a complete break with nor a binary opposite to its central referent, but rather a movement beyond its established regime of accumulation and mode of regulation to a significantly different economic order. In other words: a deconstruction (not destruction or erasure) and reconstitution (still only partial, ongoing, and incorporating selective components of the older order) of Fordist and Keynesian political economies" (Soja 2000, p. 170). The -ism marks an "alternative 'emergent' configuration of propulsive economic practices"; postfordism is "best seen as a 'holding' concept, tentatively open to multiple specifications" (p. 171).

The regime's content: vertical disintegration and re-agglomeration (Scott), flexible specialization (Piore & Sabel's "second industrial divide"), new industrial spaces and technopoles, the FIRE sector's ascent, lean-and-mean labor discipline (Harrison's "Great U-Turn" and "surge in inequality"), the Regulation School's crisis of the Fordist mode of regulation, and Harvey/Scott's "regime of flexible accumulation." Its geography: deindustrialization in the old Manufacturing Belt and reindustrialization in "new industrial spaces" — technopoles, craft-based industrial districts (the Third Italy's Marshallian districts, fabbrica diffusa), and the FIRE sector. Its dark side, which the discourse initially under-theorized: "the surge in inequality," poverty reconstituted as women and children of color, the welfare-dependent underclass, sweatshops, and homelessness — the question Soja plants at the chapter's end: "have we moved from a crisis-generated restructuring to a restructuring-generated crisis?" (p. 175).

Key Thinkers

• Edward W. Soja — the discourse's cartographer: the "Post-ford-ism" section's anatomy of the term (pp. 169–173), the critique of postindustrial sociology ("manufacturing matters," pp. 164–166), and the long-wave framing.
• Allen J. Scott (referenced, not paged — see log) — the discourse's leading exponent: Metropolis (1988), vertical disintegration, transaction-cost agglomeration, technopolis; the "manufacturing matters" attack on postindustrialism.
• Michael Storper (referenced, not paged — see log) — The Regional World: reflexivity, untraded interdependencies, the rediscovery of synekism.
• Bennett Harrison (referenced, not paged — see log) — "Lean and Mean"; the dark side of flexible production; Manpower Inc. displacing General Motors as the country's largest employer.
• Michael Piore & Charles Sabel (referenced, not paged — see log) — The Second Industrial Divide: flexible specialization against "the necessity of bigness."
• Patrik Schumacher & Christian Rogner — "After Ford": the parametricist uptake of the post-Fordist thesis within the wiki (an architecture-side heir of the same periodization).
• Doreen Massey — Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984), cited in the discourse's representative texts as the founding geography of the new division of labor.

Related Concepts

• flexible-specialization — the production regime at postfordism's core.
• crisis-generated-restructuring — the long-wave mechanism that generated postfordism out of the crisis of Fordism.
• restructuring-generated-crisis — the thesis that postfordism's success has itself begun to generate crises.
• neoliberal-metropolis — the financialized city-form of the postfordist era.
• postmetropolis — the urban condition postfordism names the economy of.
• global-city — the FIRE-sector command form Sassen pairs with the postindustrial reading (which Soja rejects for Los Angeles).
• spatial-justice — the normative question postfordism's inequality surge poses.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — chapter 6, "The Postfordist Industrial Metropolis": the term's anatomy (pp. 169–171), vertical disintegration (p. 163), flexibility's empowerment (pp. 171–173), lean-and-mean inequality (pp. 173–175), the regional rediscovery of synekism (pp. 175–180), the Los Angeles cartographies (pp. 181–187), and Scott's social-democratic policy terminus (pp. 187–188).
• After Ford (Schumacher & Rogner 2024) — the parametricist successor discourse on the post-Ford settlement, adjacent to Soja's periodization.

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Is postfordism a "holding concept, tentatively open to multiple specifications" that has now outlived its usefulness — has the era consolidated under a new name (platform capitalism, financialization), or does the deconstruction-reconstitution formula still capture the present?
• Soja notes the discourse's gender-and-race exclusions (Christopherson, McDowell via Antipode) — has the industrial-urbanist discourse since internalized the feminist critique, or does the production/consumption split persist?
• What is postfordism's interior: if Fordism produced the mass-produced dwelling, what dwelling-form does flexible production produce (the wiki's prefab-interior and kit-of-parts registers)?