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The Factory as Laboratory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Peter Miller  and
Ted O'Leary
Peter Miller
Affiliation:
Department of Accounting and Finance The London School of Economics, and Political Science
Ted O'Leary
Affiliation:
Department of Accounting, Finance and Information Systems, National University of Ireland, (University College, Cork)
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Abstract

This paper argues that science and technology studies need to adopt a much wider view of what counts as a laboratory. The factory, it is suggested, is as much a site of invention and intervention as the laboratory. As a site for the government of economic life, the factory is a laboratory par excellence. One particular factory is studied — the Decatur, Illinois, plant of Caterpillar Inc. — as it is rethought and remade in accordance with ideals of cellular manufacturing, Just-In-Time systems, customer-driven manufacturing, and competitor benchmarking. But it is not just the changes at the factory itself that are studied. The paper analyzes the linkages and relays between the redesign of a particular manufacturing plant and the plethora of calls for a revitalization of North American manufacturing industry and a new form of economic citizenship. The paper examines the remaking of a factory as an assemblage, a historically specific and temporarily stabilized complex of relations among ways of problematizing the factory in a multiplicity of locales. There are four steps to the changes analyzed here: a problematizing of the factory at the level of North American manufacturing as a whole in the 1980s; a problematizing of the notion of competitiveness at Caterpillar Inc, through the calculative practices of competitor benchmarking and related expertises; a diagraming of the ideal factory in systems terms; and the embedding of notions of the product, of competitiveness, and of a new economic citizenship in the “Assembly Highway” at the Decatur plant. Rethinking the factory took place within this assemblage of relations, rether than at any one site

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Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1994 , pp. 469 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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