Outdated production line methods

In the 1890s Frederick Winslow Taylor of the Bethlehem Steel Company began to publicize his new philosophy of management – taking the skill out of work, setting target times for individual operations, and paying bonuses to those who achieved them. This was the start of time and motion study and of the scientific management movement. Henry Ford adapted Taylor's principle of timed taks, and added to it the idea of timing, the need for a synchronized flow between operations. The systems of production and organization that emerged -- based on mass productivity, and a strict division between technical and manual labour – was by the 1920s being called Americanism or Fordism. It was embraced not just by the newly-emerging large-scale manufacturers, but also by social democrats and by Bolsheviks. It represent modernism is its economic form.

There has been a continuing competitive decline of the centres of old Fordism – North America and the UK – and a matching success of Japan, Germany, and parts of Italy and Scandinavia, where a quite different productive model is in place.