Production Systems

Production systems are configurations of labor relations and labor policies on the one hand, and product and marketing strategies of firms on the other. We have termed one manifestation of this relationship—which particularly interested us in the 1980s—“diversified quality production” (DQP): the specialization in quality-competitive rather than price-competitive goods under the “beneficial constraint” of a labor politics that makes the employment of highly skilled and highly paid workers virtually mandatory. Drawing on the experience of the German automotive industry in the 1980s, we reconstructed and theorized the rise and fall of diversified quality production in capitalist democracies before and after the neoliberal revolution.