Post Fordism: New Patterns of Production, Time, and Meaning in Contemporary Capitalism

4 credits · Graduate

With changes in technology, the internationalization of production and the massive increase in trans-border transactions of all kinds, it has been argued that we live and work in an era of substantively different capitalism. Were this true, it has deep implications for politics and for political economy. This graduate seminar explores the validity of this claim of a "new capitalism" through a variety of materials, starting with the question of whether "Fordism" ever existed, moving on to the question of whether "Post-Fordism" exists and ending with a variety of ethnographic studies that show how global production chains shape culture, gender, and hieraarchy/power.