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The unity of oposites: fordism and post-fordism

Someone who, "at this stage of the game," in the early twenty-first century, is writing about Taylorism, Fordism and the like is either nostalgic of the past or has not been updating his knowledge. Better still, he is an old-fashioned, methuselah-ish type who thinks the system is still mechanically based, as in the days when efficiency was measured with a stopwatch, its motion previously set on a process that ran through pulleys and other mechanical means. However, this is not the impression we propose in this article. Our aim is to recover concepts that flexible contemporary trendiness will not allow to be perceived as it hides indicators of permanence of Fordist operation ways, often disguised as modern, current ways. This study proposes that post-Fordism contains Fordism. In other words, Fordism is not replaced by post-Fordism, since the latter, according to the dialectic law of unity of opposites, contains Fordist elements, substances represented in a continuum. Therefore, the apparently antithetical situation does not occur, since post-Fordism includes its opposite, Fordism.

Fordism; Post-Fordism


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