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America’s Assembly Line (MIT Press)

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Description

From the Model T to nowadays’s “lean manufacturing”: the assembly line as an important, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation.

The mechanized assembly line was once invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It’s the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We will be able to still picture Chaplin’s little tramp trying to stay alongside of a factory conveyor belt.) In America’s Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made america productive and rich in the twentieth century.

The assembly line — developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts — first created and then served an expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of “lean manufacturing”; American industry reluctantly adopted the new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of more and more automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in The united states and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford’s pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.

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