The history of the Boeing corporation does not comport with any of the assertions given above. That's just one company.....
It's way more complex than what you suggest... Ian
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Yeah, whatta you want a textbook? This is e-mail.
But I would add, the most likely scenario for Boeing success (if it is a success) are the linkages between shop floor and the engineering dept, where there is a constant interplay between design, fabrication, and production, and where the distinctions and divisions of labor (and wages) between high end technical fabrication and lower end engineering are blurred---and where management is intimately engaged in both engineering and technical fabrication. This kind of blurring of formal divisions is exactly counter to the high Taylorism and extreme rationalization that Jim Farmeland noted.
I had some insight into the origins of `hi-tech' when I worked briefly in the old Lawrence Berkeley facilities about ten years ago. There were still shop floor engineers around from the heyday of nuclear weapons development---guys who started as technicians and machinists and worked their way into engineering, but stayed grounded in fabrication. Most of the scientists and high level engineers were long gone.
(BTW, the best physical scientists I've seen were in astrophysics instrumentation where there was little distinction between theory, engineering, and technical fabrication.)
If you really want to do just-in-time, and other highly rationalized systems you have to have a highly developed and highly skilled work force. You can not do it with low skilled, low wage, just-in-time work force that's called up and then let go, called up and let go.... You can not do it with a highly partitioned, and highly rationalized division of labor either. The problem with this latter approach is that all the detail of how these systems fit together depends on managers who understand the processes well enough to get them to fit together---and that understanding depends on their own technical and fabrication experience---back to the same problem.
In most corporate cost cutting and streamingly moves I've watched, usually the first to go are the engineers, then the top production workers, then the middle managers---in other words the core production teams that have evolved to make production work efficiently. That's how it has been in places I've seen. Of course, I've only seen failures, places that went bankrupt.
``How to change it......................?''
I know, but I am not saying! Fuck'm. Let it burn.
Chuck Grimes