Book Note - Nicolas Hatzfeld (1)

Does the ideal type of GERPISA research exist? Impossible, of course. But however...

The trajectory of Fiat, taken up in this book from its beginning almost a century ago, is followed from the point of view of the strategies followed by the firm. The book concentrates essentially on the post war period, and particularly on two critical periods during which the company, while experiencing difficulties, called into question the strategy followed until then and defined a new one, which involved a reorganization and new challenges. The title of the book therefore more or less sums up the identity of Fiat and announces the main lines of research.

What was at stake after the slump which followed the first petrol crisis was to reconnect the company with the market. That caused Fiat to streamline its activities, to end up with a monolithic, vertical structure, to make more homogenous sub-ensembles, centered on strategic sectors. The management was reorganized, production was massively automated and staff severely reduced, the range was modernized and the share of exportations reduced. The last element represented a weakness at the beginning of the 1990's, when the Italian market was on the decrease...Increased competition, the degradation of the distribution network and a delay in the modernization of the range all converged to bring on a second crisis for the company.

Fiat therefore embarked on the course of a new reorganization, and a second relaunching. The components of this transformation were: lean production, total quality and flexibility, a new management team, the reevaluation of internal and external relations based on the notion of the client, the partnership, the modernization of the range and the reduction of costs. The model based on participation guided the redefinition of work relationships: organization by process rather than by function, the creation of elementary technological units and new professionalism. Finally, the new idea of an integrated factory, guided the modernization of certain centers, and the creation of a new factory at Melfi. The organization of assembly-line work, however, is still a domain which has been affected little by the transformation, that is to say that for an optimistic observer, it remains an area where further progress could be made. All these transformations are organized around internationalization which has become Fiat's new main strategic line.

When analyzing this second company relaunching, Giuseppe Volpatto develops a theoretical line of thought on the question of lean production and its relation with Fordism, steering clear of the usual references on the subject. He defines Fordism as a rigid model aiming at determining and controlling, and Toyotism as a method of management of the indeterminable and the unpredictable, allowing to go beyond the rigidity of the process. Here, lean production is an attempt at hybridization, through participation, between a science of the object represented by Taylorism and a science of the subject. The adoption of Toyotist principles is therefore possible, but not the transfer of the ensemble of rules which give concrete expression to the model. The success of every company depends on its capacity of tracing its own course to a new type of organization.

1. This note is inspired by a review made by Aldo Enrietti, but it doesn't commit him, certainly.