Rethinking the Factory: Caterpillar Inc.

Abstract

Analyses of government have had little to say about the management of people within the modern corporation. This paper seeks to remedy this neglect by examining the transformation of the principles and practices for governing the factory which occurred in the USA across the last two decades of the twentieth century. This transformation included changes to the technology and physical layout of factories, changes to the concepts according to which manufacturing is organized, and changes in the public discourse concerning work and the worker. The reshaping of identities for workers and managers, and the construction of new ideas of economic citizenship, represented new ways of governing economic life. “Rethinking the factory” meant both a physical reconstruction of the factory, as well as a reconstruction of ideas and practices about how to govern the actions of persons within the reengineered customer-driven factory.