Henry Ford's management philosophy was founded on three basic principles:
1. Principle of Intensification
It consists of reducing production time with the immediate use of equipment and raw materials and the rapid placing of the product on the market.
2. Principle of Economicity
It consists of minimizing the volume of raw material in transformation.
3. Productivity Principle
It consists of increasing the production capacity of man in the same period (productivity) through specialization and the assembly line.
Ford's techniques, applied to production and the ways in which he exercised his managerial ideology in the factory and in non-factory society, in short, were the following (Quiroz, p.79):
a) Unlike Taylor, Henry Ford founded his system on the payment of high wages and mass production
For him, high wages had two purposes: the adaptation of workers to the new organization of work - less skilled, monotonous and repetitive - and, at the same time, the expansion of the automobile market, including his own workers as potential consumers, which meant a use of salary as an investment. Ford said: “the demand does not create; it must be created ”.
b) Henry Ford conceived of production as a cycle that united all the moments that comprised it - production, circulation, distribution and consumption.
Due to this, it tended to organize and control the conditions of the production and reproduction of the labor force. That is why he tried to control not only the life of the worker in the factory, but also his existence outside it: his "free time."
c) As a good "scientific rationalizer" of operations and an expert on the dynamics of production, Henry Ford would undertake a real battle against the mobility of the worker in the factory and the discontinuity between operations.
Like Taylor, it would fix the worker to the job and restrict his area of operation as much as possible. In this regard, Ford stated that “each square meter produces costs that must be reduced. Every man and every machine is given every last inch of space necessary, but not one, or in any case not one square foot, more: 'our workshops are not public gardens,' ”he declared.
d) Henry Ford would achieve the disarticulation of work by introducing the assembly line in the assembly of the car.
By creating an army of unskilled workers or specialists in a single task; a contingent of workers destined to repeat the same operation; workers belonging to the “new Fordian craft”.
The structural aspects of the Fordist system, in terms of the production process, work organization and territorial characteristics are presented in the following table (Rózga, p.59):
| Productive process | Work organization | Territorial characteristics |
| Based on economies of scale | High degree of job specialization | Spatial functional hierarchy |
| Direction of production based on resources | Little or no importance in preparation during work | Spatial division of labor |
| Vertical integration and in some cases horizontal | No experience of the learning process | Homogenization of regional labor markets |
| Cost reduction through wage control | Emphasis on reducing worker responsibility |
Component sourcing and subcontracts globally |
Finally, we suggest the following video in which the bases of scientific management and the implementation of Taylor's concepts by Ford in the production of its Model T are explained.
Bibliography
- Quiroz Trejo, José Othón. Taylorism, Fordism, and Scientific Management in the Automotive Industry. In: Management and strategy No.38, July / December 2010. pp, 75-87Rózga Luter, Ryszard. Globalization, economic restructuring and territorial changes. UAEMEX, 2001
