Organization of Production and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Jewish Immigration and the Tailoring Industry in England

This paper studies how the organization of production shapes the adoption of new technologies. We examine a shift in production organization in English tailoring induced by the arrival of Jewish tailors fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1905. When Jewish immigrant tailors arrived in England, native tailors were mostly self-employed and used sewing machines, introduced in the 1860s, to raise individual productivity. In Russia, where sewing machines were largely unavailable to them, Jewish tailors worked in ready-to-wear production, which involved a modular approach and greater collaboration within workshops. Upon arriving in England, they combined the sewing machines with their organizational practice to introduce the so-called "Jewish task system", which relied on an extensive division of labor and enabled clothing production to scale. Combining original data on production tasks with firm-level data, and using immigrant settlement patterns predating the introduction of the sewing machine as an instrument, we show that immigrant arrivals induced native tailors to reorganize production toward this system, accelerating both the diffusion of the sewing machine and England's transition to mass-produced clothing. Our findings show that organizing production efficiently around a new technology is a prerequisite for its diffusion.