any managers as essential to maintaining competitive advantage into and beyond the 21st Century. Flexible production systems opposing strict Fordist lines, made possible by these organisational changes and new technologies, permit shortened product development time. There is a new way of organising production and a departure from Fordism and all it contains. However, scientific management was used by Japanese automobile constructors in the 1970s when they began to compete using “fundamentally improved manufacturing processes that consistently produced vehicles of higher quality far faster than Detroit” (Oakes p.569). Japan car manufacturers successfully decreased labour and production costs giving American Manufacturers a run for their money, Japans Toyota is an example that used Fordism as a base of new managerial processes. Another modern day example, which drew on these two management methods, was in space science. NASA developed a set of measures to assess if they were implementing their own strategies. NASA's strategy, defined by the motto ‘cheaper, faster, better,’ was to reduce the size and cost of space probes without eliminating any important missions. Figures show that the two missions to Mars launched in late 1996 were each one-fifth the real cost of previous Mars missions (under $200 million in 1996 dollars, as opposed to an average of $1 billion each for the previous eleven U.S. spacecraft launched for Mars)”. (Oakes, 1996, p.589)Post-Fordism has been described as a “shift to the new information technologies;[a] more flexible, decentralized form of labour process and of targeting consumers by lifestyle taste and culture rather than by categories of social class… [as well as] a rise of the service and white-collar classes and the feminization of the workforce:” These are lessons managers have learnt and result in less rigidity and mechanisation and a reduction in the blue-colla...
