The growth of the globalised economy has been accompanied by repeated official optimism. Governments throughout the developed world argue that if their countries are to achieve a high-value economy, then they need ‘smart people’. A highly skilled workforce and therefore education, particularly higher education, must have the utmost priority. Thus, as noted in Chapter One, the UK’s New Labour government emphasised ‘education, education, education’ for the new millennium. In contrast, Felstead and Green (2013, p

10) recorded 5.9 million jobs in the UK requiring no qualifications, but only about 1.5 million of those who were ‘economically active’ had no qualifications. ‘At the other end of the spectrum’, they added, ‘while 8.2 million had a first or higher degree … only 6.8 million jobs stipulated that degrees were needed on entry.’ Meanwhile, rather than major skills shortages, employers consistently reported large numbers of workers in the UKCES surveys not needing to use the skills and qualifications they possessed. This calls for rethinking the optimistic ‘knowledge economy’ prognosis.

Fordism, post-Fordism or neo-Fordism?

Industrial manufacturing until late in the 20th century was founded on ‘Fordism’, a system of mass production, first implemented on a large scale in Henry Ford’s car factory in Detroit in the US. Ford exploited advances in machine tools and gauging systems to make possible the moving or continuous assembly line, in which each assembler repeated a single task. Under Fordism, mass production was complemented by a new cheapened ‘mass consumption’ for the postwar working class – with sociologists Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechhofer and Platt (1969) descrying the emergence of ‘affluent workers’ in Ford’s factory in Luton, where highly paid production line workers owned their own homes and took holidays abroad, for example.

The organisation and management of the workforce it required was as important as Ford’s production line technology. Designed to destroy the independence of traditional craft workers, Fordist production was implemented through Frederick Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ (1947). He aimed to improve economic efficiency and labour productivity by rigorous time management linked to a system of economic rewards for individual workers. For Taylor, as for Henry Ford, there was no basis for conflict between employer and employee if the former ensured the scientific management of production to maximise output.

The reality of working for Ford was shown by Beynon (1975), with production regulated by Draconian styles of management seeking to overrule stubborn opposition from the shop floor.