The Rocky Road to Mass Production: Change and Continuity in the U.S. Foundry Industry, 1890–1940

This article is a pioneering exploration of technological change in the U.S. foundry industry from the period of its most dramatic growth through its interwar stagnation and decline. Not only does it describe key changes in the mechanization and reorganization of manufacturing processes that helped transform parts of the industry into sites of classic “Fordist†mass production, but it also explains why the impact of these changes was so slow and limited. Through analysis that divides the “foundry industry†into its constituent parts (defined in terms of the forms of business organization and the types of product market that characterized them), the article locates change and continuity within different sectors of an “industry†that was in fact plural rather than singular.