This project considers the rise of “global value chains” by exploring the efforts of management at one US supercomputer producer and IBM rival—Control Data Corporation—to construct a global assembly line in response to changing US industrial policy. Global assembly exploded the Fordist self-contained, vertically-integrated factory and recomposed it by strategically placing the constituent phases of manufacturing—research and development (R&D), marketing, assembly, and subassembly—around the world. Reorganizing production lowered the cost of basic manufacturing, allowing executives to redistribute savings across the firm and internalize R&D costs. However, this productive arrangement—linking labs in Wisconsin to component plants in Tijuana and Seoul; to assembly operations in Kentucky and the Socialist Republic of Romania; and to marketing outfits in Frankfurt and Mexico City—wasn’t economically nor structurally given. This research thus traces how management constructed this production model over three decades, zeroing in on company personnel’s interactions with state officials, middle-managers, and factory workers. Critically, the project highlights said businessmen and bureaucrats’ enlistment of thousands of women globally into electronic assembly operations, transforming the social fabric of “post-Fordist” production.
This project’s primary outcome is to increase knowledge of global assembly of high-technology products—such as disk packs and semiconductors—highlighting the socio-economic and geostrategic foundation of this production model.
