[citation needed] Fordism was the dominant model of production organization from the 1910s to the 1960s, which led to the massive growth of the American manufacturing sector and the establishment of the US as an industrial powerhouse.
As such, retailers seek to collect consumer data through increased information technology to understand trends and changing demand.
"Modes of Regulation" refer to the written and unwritten laws of society which control the Regime of Accumulation and determine its form.
Proponents of Regulation theory include Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer, Bob Jessop, and Alain Lipietz.
These types of technology made adjustments simple and inexpensive, making smaller specialized production runs economically feasible.
As evidence for this theory of specialization, proponents claim that Marshallian "industrial districts," or clusters of integrated firms, have developed in places like Silicon Valley, Jutland, Småland, and several parts of Italy.
Notable Neo-Schumpeterian thinkers comprise Carlota Perez and Christopher Freeman, as well as Michael Storper and Richard Walker.
Major thinkers of this tendency include the Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Carlo Vercellone, Maurizio Lazzarato.
But this distinction has long ceased to apply in the post-Fordist New Economy, in which both spheres are structurally affected by language and communication.
The saturation of key markets brought on a turn against mass consumption and a pursuit of higher living standards.
In the economic realm, post-Fordism brought the decline of regulation and production by the nation-state and the rise of global markets and corporations.
Mass marketing was replaced by flexible specialization, and organizations began to emphasize communication more than command.
The workforce changed with an increase in internal marketing, franchising, and subcontracting and a rise in part-time, temp, self-employed, and home workers.
Prominent ideologies that arose included fragmentation and pluralism in values, post-modern eclecticism, and populist approaches to culture.
Each region specialized in a range of loosely related products and each workshop usually had five to fifty workers and often less than ten.
[14] There were several post-World War II changes in production in Japan that caused post-Fordist conditions to develop.
Fifth, Japan began to build long-term supply and subcontracting networks, which contrasted with the vertically integrated, Fordist American corporations.
The automobile industry has combined Fordist and post-Fordist strategies,[17] using both mass production and flexible specialization.
[19] Other criticisms argue that flexible specialization is not happening on any great scale, and smaller firms have always existed alongside mass production.