Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, 1990 - Business & Economics - 419 pages

William Lazonick explores how technological change has interacted with the organization of work, with major consequences for national competitiveness and industrial leadership. Looking at Britain, the United States, and Japan from the nineteenth century to the present, he explains changes in their status as industrial superpowers. Lazonick stresses the importance for industrial leadership of cooperative relations between employers and shop-floor workers. Such relations permit employers to use new technologies to their maximum potential, which in turn transforms the high fixed costs inherent in these technologies into low unit costs and large market shares. Cooperative relations can also lead employers to invest in the skills of workers themselves--skills that enable shop-floor workers to influence quality as well as quantity of production.

To build cooperative shop-floor relations, successful employers have been willing to pay workers higher wages than they could have secured elsewhere in the economy. They have also been willing to offer workers long-term employment security. These policies, Lazonick argues, have not come at the expense of profits but rather have been a precondition for making profits.

Focusing particularly on the role of labor-management relations in fostering "flexible mass production" in Japan since the 1950s, Lazonick criticizes those economists and politicians who, in the face of the Japanese challenge, would rely on free markets alone to restore the international competitiveness of industry in Britain and the United States.

From inside the book

 

Contents

Organization Technology and Value Creation I
1
Theory and History in Marxian Economics
27
From SurplusValue to Value Creation
68
Copyright

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Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor
William Lazonick
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William Lazonick
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William Lazonick
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Common terms and phrases

American argued big piecers blue-collar workers Britain British cotton textile British industry Cambridge capital capitalist capitalist development chap common mules cooperation coordination Cotton Industry cotton inputs cotton textile industry craft control craft unions decades decline division of labor dominant earnings effort and pay employers employment engineering enterprise factory Fall River firm's firms fixed costs floor growth Ibid incentive increase Industrial Relations Industrial Revolution inferior cotton investments Japanese labor force labor productivity Lars Sandberg levels of effort looms machine managerial structures managerial surplus Manchester manufacturing Marx Marx's mass producers ment minders mule spinners mule spinning nineteenth century Oldham operatives organization organizational commitment output percent period personnel rates relation between effort relations of production self-acting mule self-actors shop-floor workers Slichter social power spindles strategy surplus-value technological change theory tion Trade Union transformation unit costs University Press utilization value creation value gains value-created wages weaving William Lazonick workplace yarn

Bibliographic information

TitleCompetitive Advantage on the Shop Floor
Issue 10 of Occasional papers
AuthorWilliam Lazonick
Editionillustrated
PublisherHarvard University Press, 1990
ISBN0674154169, 9780674154162
Length419 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Business & Economics / Economics / General
Business & Economics / General
Business & Economics / Industries / General
Technology & Engineering / Manufacturing
  
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