"Fordism" was coined about 1910 to describe Henry Ford's successes in the automobile industry. Fordism signifies a range of industrial practices first associated with the workplace innovations of the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, during the last decades of the 19th Century through to the second decade of the 20th Century. This process broke down complicated tasks in many smaller and simpler ones, which were suitable of unskilled labor. The most significant innovation in the context of Fordism had been the introduction of a moving assembly line in 1913, cutting the assembly time for a complete Model T Ford chassis from a little over twelve hours to about one and a half. As a result, this created a mass production of homogenous products. Every model-T was black. Everyone got the same thing. This significantly sped up output as well as lowered average production costs in order to make an affordable product to the public. It was also very much Capital-intensive driven. Lots of mechanization allowed for efficiency. This was also a vertically integrated business. He sold 10 million inexpensive Model T automobiles, and made a vast fortune, while his employees became the highest paid factory workers in the world. As promoted internationally by the proponents of Fordism, Detroit served as a model of urbanism placed in the service of optimized industrial production.
The fordist production system has four important elements. First, it is characterized by a distinctive division of labor - i.e. the separation of different work tasks between different groups of workers - in which unskilled workers execute simple, repetitive tasks and skilled technical and managerial workers undertake functions related to research, design, quality control, finance, coordination, and marketing. Second, it is a system in which manufacture of parts and components is highly standardized. Third, it is organized not around groups of similar machinery, but machines arranged in the correct sequence required manufacturing a product. Finally, the various parts of the production process are linked together by a moving conveyor belt - the assembly line - to facilitate the quick and efficient fulfillment of tasks. Together, these four attributes can provide cost of production of a single product. Prices can be reduced, leading to increased sales and the potential development of mass markets for the commodity in question.
Many commentators believe that Fordism was characteristic of Western industry from about 1945 to some time in the 1970s, and that it was linked with the rise of major car manufacturing regions in the Western world, such as the West Midlands conurbation of Britain or Detroit in the US. Fordism is associated by geographers with a distinctive spatial pattern of economic activity, or spatial division of labor; that is, with the spatial separation of the development of the product, at the centre of research and development, and the actual sites of the production of a standardized product. It remained a dominant economic approach in the market places of the industrialized world until the 1960-70s when many widespread assumptions about mass production and, more especially, the conformity of the consumer began to be challenged by a growing number of designers, thinkers, and consumers. In time, terms such as ‘Post-Industrial’, ‘Post-Fordism’, and ‘niche-marketing’ would come into being.
As a technological fix, Fordism was part of the Efficiency Movement which characterized the American Progressive Era. After the Great Depression began, American policy was to keep wages high in hopes that Fordism would reverse the downturn.[citation needed]
