Essay Fordism: Spawning New Management Styles

Words: 2780
Pages: 12

Introduction.
In this essay the focus is on Henry Ford and Fordism. The first paragraph of the essay is an introduction of Fredrick W Taylor, and how Fordism is derived from the ideas of Taylorism. It also looks at the main ideas behind Fordism and scientific management. Further in the essay the importance is to look at the different ideas of Fordism (the mass-production, the $5 day, the division of labour and management style), and on why it was important at is time and the effect following from those ideas. The essay has two different paragraphs discussing the positive and the negative effects of Fordism on management and organisations, and workers and society. In the end of the essay there is some paragraphs about the new forms of
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In Fordism it was a managerial hierarchy (top-bottom), technical controls and strict time-limits, and every task was separated into their simplest constituent elements, making the work routinized.(Robert J Antonio, Alessandro Bonanno, 2000; RMIT University 2012) But the work task of speeding it all up and making every work task easy led to a deskilling of the workers, and have been criticised on humanistic grounds.(RMIT Universit 2012; F. Xu, T. Rickards 2007) With the deskilling of the workers the managers perceived the workers as stupid, and therefore all the decision making was taken away from them, and they were treated like replaceable parts of the machinery.(F. Xu, T. Rickards 2007) Fords business got the affect of the cooperation costs, because with the deskilling of workers, and wanting to have control over the quantity and quality over the workers performance, they needed to hire management to conduct those jobs, which were extra expenses. (RMIT University 2012) And with the workers constantly being controlled and supervised, the relationship between the managers and the workers became tense and the workers lost commitment to Fords manufacture, because they were frustrated and dissatisfy, but this led to management having to control the workers even more. (RMIT University 2012)

It is important to highlight that there were positive affects from Fordism on the