Yes, and nothing in H&N's argument goes against this. The idea of a shift from Fordism to post-Fordism doesn't mean that the economy is shifting from widgets to symbols. It means that changes in symbolic forms of production have an affect on widget-based production. The way in which the number of people involved in industrial production has expanded is an example of this, as the ability of western companies to use manufacturing labor in non-western countries was enhanced by various developments in symbolic labor (the logistical ability to manage longer supply chains, for example). The paradigmatic post-Fordist company isn't Microsoft, it's Walmart, which directs the production and distribution of material goods from all around the world.
^^^^^^^ CB: The leaps in communication and transportation through computerization, satellites, robotics, containerization allow the scattering of the points of production geographically, globally. In _Capital_ Marx's analyzes the fundamentals of modern industry , machinery and cooperation here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch12.htm
Part IV: Production of Relative Surplus Value
Ch. 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value Ch. 13: Co-operation Ch. 14: Division of Labour and Manufacture Ch. 15: Machinery and Modern Industry
The modern factory system that Marx analyzed there concentrated workers in one location , co-operation the classic Leninist giant factory site, and employed machinery both to increase the rate of surplus-value, relative surplus value.
The developments in communication and transportation of the last 35 years allow the negation of co-operation ( big factories, and industrial cities and regions, like the US Midwest) _without loss in production of surplus value_ .
This is a dialectical negation in that one aspect of the contradiction , machinery, developed through comuperiztion, robotics, satellites, containers, just in time production, et al, such that it allowed the negation of the other fundamental aspect of the contradiction, co-operation ( concentration of workers in one plant and industrial cities , like Detroit where Henry Ford of "Fordism" was, and regions, like the US midwest.) The points of production can be scattered around the globe without loss of production of surplus value, and with the added benefit of separating workers from each other. Recall that Marx emphasized that the concentrations of workers in factories and certain cities was important in their sensing their potential power and helped with communist organization. The capitalists are glad to scatter them and separate them from each other.