Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor
Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor explores how technological change has interacted with the organization of work, with major consequences for national competitiveness and industrial leadership. Looking at Britain, the United States, and Japan from the nineteenth century to the present, it explains changes in their status as industrial superpowers. Further, this book stresses the importance of the industrial leadership of cooperative relations between employers and shop-floor workers.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Organization, Technology, and Value Creation
Part I: Theory and History in the Nineteenth Century
Theory and History in Marxian Economics
Minders, Piecers, and Self-Acting Mules
More Than One Way to Spin a Mule
Spinning and Weaving to Industrial Decline
Part II: Competitive Realities in the Twentieth Century
The Persistence of Craft Control
Managerial Capitalism and Economies of Speed
Perspectives on the Twenties
The Challenge of Flexible Mass Production
Organization and Technology in Capitalist Development
Appendix: The Basic Analytics of Shop-Floor Value Creation
Notes