David E. Nye puts the lie to generalizations based on Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor in the fifth chapter of his book. He rather devastatingly deconstructs the "neo-Marxist" interpretation of these late Industrial Revolutionary pioneers, which tends to cast both men as larger-than-life symbols of an inhuman, efficiency-obsessed management movement that wrested economic power from skilled laborers and small artisans. "The confusions here are legion," Mr. Nye notes, pointing out that neither the highly eccentric assembly-line innovator nor the always-controversial workplace efficiency promoter succeeded in taking over American industry with their methods (133). Nor is there much proof that they ever attempted to do so. As the author explains in detail, the profits enjoyed by Ford Motor Company and some (though not all) of Mr. Taylor's clients were due more to specific, highly valuable innovations (interchangeable parts, a harder type of steel, &c.) than to any general principles about the exploitation of labor.
In addition to the uneven track record of Mr. Taylor's methods, Mr. Nye cites as evidence of continued labor-market dynamism and heterogeneity the fact that "As late as 1930, fewer than half of American businesses had converted to the corporate form...most firms remained smaller, family-run affairs" (148). As a matter of fact, this remains the case today; the vast majority of American business income is generated by sole proprietorships and partnerships--a fact sometimes lost amid bickering over the extent of corporate power or the appropriate level of taxation on the corporate elite.
"Ford's atypicality," Mr. Nye concludes, "reminds us that the industrial system that emerged in the United States between 1880 and 1930 was not monolithic. As a whole it did not pass through a historical stage of 'Taylorism' or one of 'Fordist production'" (151). As the author shows, the late industrializing period in America was for laborers not a time of mute submission and homogenization but of dynamism, danger, and continually-expanding opportunity.
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