Page 236 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

224 STUART HALL

decentralized form of labour process and work organization, and, as a
consequence, a decline of the old manufacturing base (and the regions and
cultures associated with it) and the growth of the ‘sunrise’, computer-based,
hi-tech industries and their regions. Third, there is the hiving-off or a
contracting-out of functions and services hitherto provided ‘in house’ on a
corporate basis. Fourth, there is a leading role for consumption, reflected in
such things as greater emphasis on choice and product differentiation, on
marketing, packaging and design, on the ‘targeting’ of consumers by
lifestyle, taste and culture rather than by the Registrar General’s categories
of social class.
Fifth, there has been a decline in the proportion of the skilled, male,
manual working class and the corresponding rise of the service and white-
collar classes. In the domain of paid work itself, there is more flexi-time
and part-time working, coupled with the ‘feminization’ and ‘ethnicization’
of the workforce. Sixth, there is an economy dominated by the
multinationals, with their new international division of labour and their
greater autonomy of nation-state control. Seventh, there is the
‘globalization’ of the new financial markets. Finally, there is the emergence
of new patterns of social divisions—especially those between ‘public’ and
‘private’ sectors and between the two-thirds who have rising expectations
and the ‘new poor’ and underclasses of the one-third that is left behind on
every significant dimension of social opportunity.
It is clear that ‘post-Fordism’, though having a significant reference to
questions of economic organization and structure, has a much broader
social and cultural significance. Thus, for example, it also signals greater
social fragmentation and pluralism, the weakening of older collective
solidarities and block identities and the emergence of new identities as well
as the maximization of individual choices through personal consumption,
as equally significant dimensions of the shift towards ‘post-Fordism’.
Some critics have suggested that ‘post-Fordism’ as a concept marks a
return to the old, discredited base-superstructure or economic-determinist
model according to which the economy determines everything and all other
aspects can be ‘read off as simply reflecting that ‘base’. However, the
metaphor of ‘post-Fordism’ does not necessarily carry any such implication.
Indeed, it is modelled on Gramsci’s earlier use of the term, ‘Fordism’, at the
turn of the century to connote a whole shift in capitalist civilization (which
Gramsci certainly did not reduce to a mere phenomenon of the economic
base). ‘Post-Fordism’ should also be read in a much broader way. Indeed, it
could just as easily be taken in the opposite way—as signalling the
constitutive role which social and cultural relations play in relation to any
economic system. Post-Fordism as I understand it is not committed to any
prior determining position for the economy. But it does insist—as all but
the most extreme discourse theorists and culturalists must recognize—that