Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
industrial innovations became progressively more unilateral than bilat-
eral, with Britain adopting and adapting American innovations within its
own industrial context (Casson and McCann 1999).
Many of the ideas originated in the US refining, distilling, and tobacco
industries, but their worldwide impact on production organization arose
primarily due to their application in metal working industries, which dom-
inated goods production in the early twentieth century (Guy 2009). The
automotive manufacturer Ford first developed the automated produc-
tion line at the turn of the twentieth century based on techniques already
adopted in US slaughter houses, in which the continuous flow of materials
was ensured by a conveyor belt. Soon other US industries adapted these
ideas to their production, and the assembly line became the standard pro-
duction model for many industries. Central to this system was the need for
managerial coordination to ensure the smooth running of internal opera-
tions. This is because the whole system was vulnerable to individual breaks
in the chain of activities. The requisite coordination of these large-scale
activities therefore contributed to the second major industrial innovation
with US origins, namely the development of a large managerial hierarchy.
This came both as a response to the technical economies of scale afforded
by increasing firm size in sectors such as railroads (Chandler 1977) and
automobiles, and also as a means of establishing market control over pro-
duction factors and inputs, particularly in sectors such as oil and steel. The
principle of managerial control extended well beyond merely coordinating
activities within the plant to include the control of the flow of inputs into
the plant and, wherever possible, to integrate production, inventory, and
marketing operations. The internal integration of all these activities was
intended to ensure a stable market environment for a firm's inputs and
outputs and to exclude any other external influences (Casson and McCann
1999).
The American principles of standardized production based on inter-
changeable parts required a change in labour practices, from the employ-
ment of traditional craftsmen to ones based on specialization, precision
working, and measurement. During the last decades of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the changes
in production techniques and labour practices went much farther. The
third major industrial innovation was the development of flow-line princi-
ples of production, in which groups of machines were laid out according to
the order of the machining activity required, instead of according to func-
tion. This process innovation, which reduced internal inventory handling
and transport costs, required inventory flows to be balanced at all points
in the production process, affording major economies of time by increas-
ing the speed of production throughput. However, genuine mass produc-
