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well, toyota has at least 3 main innovations---at the level of technology, they worked out a far more effective and efficient way of transitioning the assembly line from one model to another---the older school american auto model was centered on long production runs of a single basic type of car. switching this basic type was complicated, time-consuming and expensive---remember that early on the switch from the model t to the model a nearly bankrupted ford. toyota benefitted from the japanese "developmental state" in the workign out and implementing not only a vastly improved technology at the center of assembly line production, but also an alternative work organization for assembly workers, who operate in a short production run context as teams. this is an enormous advantage. [[btw in the 70s a parallel system waqs developed at volvo's uddavalla factory---this had a different political conception built into it which involves types of power-sharing between workers and management that were not present in the toyota model---so for a while there was a "good guy/bad guy in debates about flex accumulation...
the second area is in the adaptation of just in time to supply chain development, which accelerated the fragmentation of the manufacturing process. in general, where the old american model relied on economies of scale linked to long production runs for profit, toyota opts for flexibility in production linked to tight controls on pricing and quality and timing of suppliers and the products that they deliver---so suppliers end up absorbing costs that would otherwise have been associated with production.
it seems to me that the american auto industry knew this model was a problem for them pretty early in the game and opted to retain it's production model and focus on types of automobiles that toyota etc were not producing--which looks to me like a decision to cede defeat to toyota etc in the longer run and seal themselves into it by not adapting the technology at the center of the assembly process. i would imagine that had there been a state industrial policy and funding parallel to that which the japanese ad in place that they would have been able to consider retooling when it was still relatively straightforward to do it. now they are basically hoisted by the consequences of these decisions--if that's the case, then the problems the big 3 now face cannot simply be connected to management--it is a function of the entire american business culture as well (the emphasis on short-term profits over long-term thinking, the substitution of the movement of capital for production as a form of industrial and social organization) and the disadvantage that the american refusal to implement an industrial policy created within that context.
this is a short version of why i see the trouble detriot is now in as yet another expression of the incoherences of neoliberalism.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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