FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

BEYOND MASS PRODUCTION

 

And if we regard the factory as the home of mass production, they would be right. For mass production is not whnt this facility is all about. We have moved beyond mass production.

 

MOUSE MILK AND T-SHIRTS

It is conventional knowledge by now that the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing in the “advanced” nations has declined in the past twenty years. (In the United States today only 9 percent of the total population—20 million workers—manufacture goods for some 220 million people. The remaining 65 million workers provide services and manipulate symbols.) And as this shrinkage of manufacturing has accelerated in the industrial world, more and more routine manufacturing has been farmed out to the so-called developing countries, from Algeria to Mexico and Thailand. Like rusty used cars, the most backward Second Wave industries are thus exported from the rich nations to the poor.

For strategic as well as economic reasons, the rich nations cannot afford to surrender manufacturing altogether, and they will not become pure examples of “service societies” or “information economies.” The image of the rich world living off nonmaterial production while the rest of the world engages in the output of material goods is highly oversimplified. Instead, we will find the rich nations continuing to manufacture key goods—but needing fewer workers to do so. For we are transforming the very way goods are made.

The essence of Second Wave manufacture was the long “run” of millions of identical, standardized products. By contrast, the essence of Third Wave manufacture is the short run of partially or completely customized products.

The public still tends to think of manufacture in terms of long runs, and we do of course continue to turn out cigarettes by the billion, textiles by the millions of yards, light bulbs, matches, bricks, or spark plugs in astronomical quantities. No doubt we will continue to do so for some time. Yet these are precisely the products of the more backward industries rather than the most advanced, and today they account for only about 5 percent of all our manufactured goods.

 

 

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