Abstract

"Forging Post-Fordism, Globally: GM-Toyota Joint Venture and the Politics of Industrial Experimentation, 1976–1984"

Minwoo Kong, Columbia University (mk5106@columbia.edu)

This paper reconstructs the 1970-1990s as a period of US history in which industrial experimentation in search of alternative production models thrived, challenging the teleological assumption of the inevitable fall of industry. Whereas the previous historiography has foregrounded the industrial triangle of business, labor, and the state as a way of framing the postwar political economy, how this hegemonic assemblage conditioned the transformations of later decades has largely been neglected. Although post-2008 scholarship has endeavored to historicize the late-century US political economy, the lacuna remains unfilled: most have focused on the rise of finance or services and the agency of neoliberals.This paper addresses that historiographical gap by examining how American industrial actors experimented with post-Fordist alternatives to reforge their crisis-ridden Fordism by partnering with global competitors. As much as the crisis was global in origin, so too was the American response. One significant way of this was the pursuit of joint ventures with post-Fordist global competitors—especially Japan and Sweden. Business framed joint ventures as opportunities to experiment with and transfer alternative models of production—”just-in-time,” worker participation, and computerization, as technological or organizational fixes for faltering productivity. Drawing on the GM-Toyota joint venture and congressional debates, I demonstrate that active policy intervention underpinned this late-century politics of industrial experimentation. The Reagan administration actively facilitated these collaborations through tariff adjustments and antimonopoly deregulation—which neoliberals such as Robert Reich derisively called “Reagan’s Industrial Policy.” Labor’s maneuver also defies conventional understandings: the UAW enthusiastically participated in the venture, seeking to seize the opportunity to reshape workplace control. Within this pursuit of productivity improvement emerged a new practice of economic hegemony—the centripetal power that manages global interdependence from within the nexus of global production, replacing the centrifugal dynamic of foregone Fordism.