Rethinking the assembly line: Organisation, performance and productivity in Ford Motor Company, c. 1908-27

Previous assessments of Ford's assembly line have been based on a limited set of highly aggregated data. New, more detailed and extensive data allows a reconsideration of Ford's operations and their effectiveness to confirm more fully some earlier understandings through extending the analyses to show the line's impact over a longer period and with more detail about its operational and organisational effects. The reconsideration also challenges some earlier ideas to show that the line was intensively exploited to yield productivity improvements, and that it was not so rigidly used as previously thought.