Motor City: Ford, Mass Production and the Industrial Ecology of Detroit, 1908-1927

1908年至1923年间，福特汽车公司的年产量从6000辆激增至180万辆。该公司的迅速崛起使亨利·福特在全国范围内声名鹊起，并成为高地公园和胭脂河工厂的标志。这篇由科学、技术和社会项目资助的论文认为，历史学家们忽视了大规模生产出现背后的一个关键发展：围绕“采购功能”组织起来的工业物流创新系统。最近，商业史上的实证研究表明，福特至少在1916年之前，每款T型车的5000个零件中，有一半是从外部供应商那里购买的，这一年的产量达到了58.5万辆。福特的大规模生产不仅是尖端技术，也是一把双刃剑。装配线极大地促进了内部同步，但它也需要前所未有的外部协调。该项目考察了底特律作为工业网络的站点，调查了企业间控制系统和它们所依赖的城市景观。它研究了作为技术专家的汽车采购代理，以及汽车行业“外部供应商”找到利基的制造区域的重建。该项目通过将工业采购的历史与市政发展的历史相结合，将底特律的大规模生产作为一项政治成就和技术成就进行评估。尽管自20世纪80年代以来，已经出现了大量与日本“准时制库存”和“供应链管理”模式相关的学术研究，但美国早期工业采购的历史尚未被书写。该项目从制造网络和工业区的角度重构了大规模生产的历史。它对工业实践、商业组织、标准和标准化、“区域优势”和汽车历史等方面的文献做出了贡献。

Between 1908 and 1923, annual production at the Ford Motor Company exploded from 6,000 to 1,800,000 automobiles. The company's meteoric rise propelled Henry Ford to national fame and made icons of the sprawling plants at Highland Park and River Rouge. This dissertation funded by the Science, Technology & Society Program argues that historians have overlooked a key development behind the advent of mass production: innovative systems of industrial logistics organized around "the purchasing function." Recent, empirical scholarship in business history indicates that Ford continued to buy half of the 5,000 parts in each Model T from outside suppliers until at least 1916, a year in which production reached 585,000 cars. Mass production at Ford was not only cutting-edge, it was double-edged. The assembly line facilitated an exceptional degree of internal synchronization, but it also entailed an unprecedented level of external coordination. This project examines Detroit as the site of an industrial network, investigating systems of inter-firm control and the urban landscape on which they depended. It studies automotive purchasing agents as technical experts and the reconstruction of manufacturing districts where the automobile industry's "outside suppliers" made their niche. The project assesses mass production in Detroit as a political as well as a technological achievement by combining the history of industrial procurement with the history of municipal growth. Although a spate of scholarship related to Japanese models of "just-in-time inventory" and "supply chain management" has appeared since the 1980s, the history of early industrial procurement in the U.S. has yet to be written. This project reframes the history of mass production in terms of manufacturing networks and industrial districts. It contributes to literature concerned with industrial practice, business organization, standards and standardization, "regional advantage," and the history of the automobile.