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Impact: A Journal of Community and Cultural Inquiry in Education

Eric Ferris

Abstract

Beginning with Peter Beilharz’s (2015) assertion that the modern and its active form, modernization, are often reductively conflated with both Fordism and Americanism, this essay teases out the idea that modernization is multifaceted, contested, and global in scope, despite the pains that both Fordism and Americanism have taken to obscure this unevenness in an attempt to monopolize the narrative of modernization. From there, it takes seriously Beilharz’s (2015) assertion that modernization imprints itself onto both production and consumption, and that among its paramount innovations is its impact on culture. The essay asserts that in addition to the automobile, Fordism has been instrumental in the disciplining of bodies, the socialization of individuals, and the furthering of individualization, all inroads that have allowed for a more totalizing form of human management that extends beyond the “factory walls.” Finally, the essay takes the archetypes of the automobile and its foil, mass transportation, to suggest that inequality, segregation, stratification, insecurity, privilege, and the dissolution of togetherness, among other things, are intended outcomes of Fordist modernization, all emerging from the values of individualization, competition, and consumption. It also uses these archetypes to question and even counter Fordism’s claim to be the sole legitimate form of modernization.

Keywords: Beilharz, consumption, culture, Fordism, modernization

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