Creative Cross-Fertilization and Uneven Americanization of Swedish Industry: Sources of Innovation in Post-War Motor Vehicles and Electrical Manufacturing

Abstract

By emphasizing the rigid character of centralized bargaining, many students of Sweden's political economy end up by wrongly characterizing its national industry as ‘Fordist’. By contrast, this chapter argues that the strategic responses to increased competitiveness actually varied across sectors. In motor vehicles and electrical engineering, the experience of diversity of market realities, heterogeneous institutions, and conflicting political goals forced enthusiastic proponents of Americanization to modify or abandon their view on the fundamentals of industrial efficiency. Pressure from customers for innovation, small batch production, adaptation, and successive upgrading of existing products created obstacles to standardization. It was not until increased liberalization of world trade and competitive pressures began to make themselves felt in export as well as domestic markets that the ambiguities of Swedish industrial practices became manifest, spurring national industry to redefine its identity through a process of strategic debate and selective adaptation.