The hegemonic foundations of U.S. automobile industry development: A history of market and shop floor regulation. (Volumes 1-3)

The study uses archival, interview, and quantitative evidence to examine how the automobile firm managements tamed the labor militancy that was disrupting production schedules throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It links the decline of wildcat activity in the automobile industry after 1958 to both market and shop floor level developments. These developments were: (1) the emergence of a market structure that, in part, enabled the automobile firms to avoid serious price and market share competition and its disruptive effects upon production processes; and (2) the routinization of key production processes so that they reproduced shop floor experiences consistent with the notions of legitimacy held by those occupational groups in the industry with a structural capacity for initiating collective protest action.; This study challenges theories suggesting that a monolithic, industry-wide structure developed in the post-WWII period and won workers' commitments to participating in the labor process. It shows that specific occupational groups initiated most of the labor militancy in the 1940s and 1950s, and that the everyday work experiences of these groups differed considerably from that of those working on machine-paced assembly lines. It shows that managements eventually "decoupled" these occupational groups from those without militant structural capacities and responded to them in different ways. The study suggests that dual authority systems emerged from this process. It also shows that, while a market regulating system did emerge in the industry for regulating destructive price and market share competition, its effects upon shop floor developments after 1958 were much more limited than those anticipated in theories linking shop floor developments to the emergence of a monopoly capitalist market structure.