Question

Discuss two challenges American cities have faced during the Post-Industrial or Post-Fordist Era.5-10 sentences

Answer 1

Theories of post-Industrial Society:-

Strength of the concept of post-industrial society depends on its being able to identify broader social propelled by the initial shift in occupational structure. The leading theorists have tried to do this.

If we talk about the American cities then we know that in both the American Daniel Bell (1974) and the Frenchman Alain Touraine (1969), the leading initial theorists, expected a rise in the educational levels of the work force; for Bell, the university based scientistworking for public service would be the emblematic figure of post-industrial society, in the same way that the production-line worker had been the emblematic figure of industrial society and the peasant digging the land that of preindustrial. In this they were partly right; the typical formal educational levels of persons working in many services activities are considerably higher than those in manufacturing. However, as noted, this is true of only some sectors: business, and personal and community services; not distribution and personal services (Castells 2000, Crouch 1999).

Bell and Touraine entertained opposite expectations of class structure. For the former, the decline of the industrial proletariat, a declining importance of material as opposed to intellectual capital, and the overall rise in education standards would see the emergence of a more classless society. Touraine, however, did not expect capitalist management to respond creatively to the new intellectual capacities of the work force. He therefore predicted intensified class conflict as the intellectual capacities of the work force grew. Both have been wrong. Bell was right in expecting that the decline of manual manufacturing work would produce a decline in class organization. However, he was unable in 1974 to anticipate the extraordinary resurgence of financial capital and shareholder power which would follow the global liberalization of capital markets and their association with new information technology to acquire an historically unique flexibility and mobility.

Theories of Post-fordist era:-

It is the dominant system of economic production, consumption, and associated socio economic phenomena in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century. Henry Ford helped popularize the first meaning in the 1920s, and Fordism came to signify modernity in general. For example, writing in prison in the interwar period, the Italian communist Antonio Gramscidiscussed the economic, political, and social obstacles to the transfer of Americanism and Fordism to continental Europe and highlighted its potential transformative power when controlled by workers rather than conservative forces. Gramsci’s comments inspired research on postwar Fordism and its crisis.

The Fordist mode of growth became dominant in advanced capitalism during postwar reconstruction and is often credited with facilitating the long postwar boom. During the 1970s, however, its underlying crisis tendencies became more evident. The growth potential of mass production was gradually exhausted, and there was intensified working-class resistance to its alienating working conditions; the market for mass consumer durables became saturated; a declining profit rate coincided with stagflation; a fiscal crisis developed; internationalization made state economic management less effective; clients began to reject standardized, bureaucratictreatment in the welfare state; and American economic dominance and political hegemony were threatened by European and East Asian expansion. These phenomena prompted a wide-ranging search for solutions to the crisis of Fordism, either by restoring its typical growth dynamics to produce a neo-Fordist regime or by developing a new post-Fordist accumulation regime and mode of regulation.