New manufacturing paradigms

Mass production has contributed to American prosperity and made available a host of inexpensive products for consumers, industry, and government. Today, however, new paradigms of production are causing revolutionary changes in how managers, engineers, and workers think about making things. This paper describes the main features of “old-era” and “new-era” industrialization and shows how key public policies designed with the old paradigms in mind need to be changed in view of the new.