Two MacArthur Prize Fellows argue that to get out of its current economic crisis industry should abandon its attachment to standardized mass production for a system of flexible specialization.

Work and Politics develops a historical and comparative sociology of workplace relations in industrial capitalist societies. Professor Sabel argues that the system of mass production using specialized machines and mostly unskilled workers was the result of the distribution of power and wealth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, not of an inexorable logic of technological advance. Once in place, this system created the need for workers with systematically different ideas about the acquisition of skill and the desirability of long-term employment....

This book presents a bold and original reinterpretation of Western industrialization from the eighteenth century to the present day in terms of the interplay between flexibility and mass production. Drawing on extensive new research by a multinational and multidisciplinary team of scholars, the volume challenges standard views about the inevitable triumph of the large-scale, vertically-integrated corporate enterprise. In contrast, World of Possibilities highlights the plurality of forms of successful industrial organization, past and present, throughout the Western world.

This book presents a bold and original reinterpretation of Western industrialization from the eighteenth century to the present day in terms of the interplay between flexibility and mass production. Drawing on extensive new research by a multinational and multidisciplinary team of scholars, the volume challenges standard views about the inevitable triumph of the large-scale, vertically-integrated corporate enterprise. In contrast, World of Possibilities highlights the plurality of forms of successful industrial organization, past and present, throughout the Western world.