Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (review)

As global changes over the past twenty-five years have brought down old stalwarts of American business, historians have begun to rethink the central role of big corporations and mass production in the national economic narrative. In an impressive survey of “specialist” manufacturing, Philip Scranton investigates alternatives to mass production in a key period once thought wholly dominated by high-throughput giants.

Scranton has two targets. First, he takes on pundits and popularizers who, bedazzled by ill-defined notions like “Fordism” and “Taylorism” penned popular briefs in the cause of assembly-line technologies, rigid standardization, and corporate behemoths. Even critics of standardization and soulless mass production too often assumed that was all there was to the story. Scranton shows otherwise, noting that specialist producers using skilled labor accounted for as much value added in manufacturing as mass producers throughout the period. The strategies of these firms embraced diversity in output, novelty in design, and external rather than internal economies of production and distribution. Place remained crucial to their success. America did not, in other words, become a homogeneous economic plane filled with self-contained factories. Non-mass production firms supported institutions for worker training and took collective action on quality, marketing, and pricing. These industrial districts varied with local conditions, a geographical equivalent to the heterogeneity of products and production techniques.

By subverting the deterministic narrative of mass production, Scranton has helped to make the story of the American economy safe for diversity once again. His book raises, though does not answer, the very interesting cultural question of why mass production gripped the imagination of so many critics and students of American society. As he shows, even successful specialists had to fight against their own and consultants’ fascination with standardization at all cost and Taylorite labor-management systems that could not work for their firms.

Scranton also challenges the rich narrative of American business history set out by Alfred D. Chandler and his many students and followers. By avoiding a teleological approach that reads contemporary conditions backward to their source, Scranton maintains, we can see that outcomes were contingent, and there was no inherent reason for the “rise of big business.” Of course, it is the contemporary failure of certain big businesses and the current explorations of flexible manufacturing techniques around the world that in part motivate Scranton’s own study.

No one can come away from this book still believing that the “Chandler” type firm—big in size, vertically integrated, characterized by economies of scale and scope in production—was all that mattered, even in the years when those firms were first being assembled. Scranton supplies an alternative to the inadequate distinction between large “center” firms and small “peripheral” ones. Some of his firms were, like Baldwin Locomotive, big firms building big products. In other cases, companies identified with mass production, General Electric and Western Electric, still generated much of their output using batch technique. Specialist producers tended toward one pole of a range of manufacturing platforms, with, say, Ford Motor Company at the other end. Some of the firms Scranton studies are closer to the center of this spectrum, leading to awkward hybrid terms like “integrated anchors” and “specialist auxiliaries.” In pursuing contingency and diversity, we also leave behind the smooth chronology and well-understood terminology of older syntheses.

To what extent is this book a step toward a new synthesis? Perhaps that is an unfair question given the author’s skepticism of master narratives. But students still have to be taught, and the answer “history is complex” rarely satisfies even hardened professionals. One could argue, therefore, that Scranton has extended rather than overturned Chandler. Both begin with technology—manufacturing technology in this case. Although technology is not determinative for Scranton, like Chandler he looks mainly at the economic context. Demand and markets impinge on firms’ choice of technique. For Scranton, it is the consumer’s desire for...