Talking the Post‐Fordist Talk,...but Walking the Post‐industrial Walk

Recent innovations applied to the design and management of production in the United States have been termed “post‐Fordist”, in an effort to distinguish these methods from those of large‐scale mass‐production characteristic of earlier decades. These efforts, however, may be vulnerable to criticism from both a conceptual and also a practical position. Specifically, suggests that post‐Fordist methods not only fail to live up to their ideological promise, but are inappropriate to our current “post‐industrial” state of diminishing manufacturing output.