Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms and abbreviations
- Part I The workshop versus the factory
- 1 Introduction: explaining factory evolution
- 2 Past production paradigms: the workshop, Taylorism and Fordism
- 3 Productivity for prosperity: industrial renewal and Cold War politics
- Part II Technologies of control
- Part III Cybernation and flexibility
- Appendix: sources and methods
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: explaining factory evolution
from Part I - The workshop versus the factory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of acronyms and abbreviations
- Part I The workshop versus the factory
- 1 Introduction: explaining factory evolution
- 2 Past production paradigms: the workshop, Taylorism and Fordism
- 3 Productivity for prosperity: industrial renewal and Cold War politics
- Part II Technologies of control
- Part III Cybernation and flexibility
- Appendix: sources and methods
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The factory is the organisational and economic core of industrialism. It is a complex of planning, controlling and operating activities. Many believe: ‘we have now the technology’ to replace this complex of individual and social activities by an all-encompassing, integrated machine system. Micro-electronic computers can control and co-ordinate a variety of automatic equipment from a central source. Since the 1980s journalists, politicians, industrialists and technologists have linked new micro-electronic technology with the imminent arrival of ‘workerless’, robotised factories. Yet many of the principles underlying this ‘cybernation’ have motivated factory development since the industrial revolution. Moreover, such integrated mechanisation of production is a goal that has hardly ever been realised. This book aims to assess the feasibility of these latest attempts; both in relation to previous failures, and the interaction between successive technologies and social and economic factors.
‘Automation’ refers to the age-old trend of replacing discrete human actions by machine operations. When first coined, in the 1940s, it referred to the linking of different machines by new controlling devices. However, in the last two decades technologists have envisaged automatic control of the broader execution, integration and control of entire functions and groups of functions – material processing, assembly, testing, storage etc. Because such a process implies the automation of automatons new terminology is useful. Thus this latter development, which concretises long-standing aspirations for a ‘self-acting’ factory, will be referred to in this book as ‘cybernation’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Forcing the Factory of the FutureCybernation and Societal Institutions, pp. 3 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997