Fordism was a model of economic development characterized by mass production and mass consumption in the United States and Western Europe between the 1930s and 1970s. The term was first used by Antonio Gramsci to describe Henry Ford's automobile industry, and later developed into a theoretical framework to study capitalism by French regulation school. Fordism consisted of a labor process of Taylorism, a regime of accumulation, a mode of regulation, and a pattern of social organization. In response to the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s, post‐Fordism includes a number of alternative development models, of which flexible specialization has been the most influential in geography. Both Fordism and Post‐Fordism have been widely used by geographers, particularly of the Marxist tradition, to study changing labor relations and associated social formations in major capitalist economies.
