Spot-Welding Technology and the Development of Robotics at Fiat, 1972-87: A Case of Managerial Discontinuity?

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This article could not have been written without the help of many people and institutions. The European Commission financed my research with a Marie Curie Fellowship. I am grateful indeed to many people from Fiat. In particular, I whish to thank Giusepe Berta, Giusi Cortese and Massimo Castagnola from the Archivio Storico Fiat, and Paola De Nard, Antonio Malandri and Francesco Scimone from Fiat Auto. As a working paper, the article has been presented at various conferences, workshops and seminars at the LSE, the Manchester Federal School of Business and Management, the EHES Summer School, the Economic History Conference, and the Hagley Center for the History of Technology, Business and Society. I would particularly like to thank Patrick O'Brien, Paul Johnson, Philip Scranton, Jonathan Zeitlin, Sukhdev Johal and Karel Williams for their useful comments. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to Terry Gourvish and Max Schultze for providing me with guidance, support and inspiration during my entire research. Any errors that remain are my own. G. Volpato, Il caso Fiat. Una strategia di riorganizzazione e di rilancio (The Fiat Case: A Restructuring Strategy to Recovering) (Turin, 1996). F. Amatori, ‘Gli uomini del Professore. Strategie, organizzazione, management alla Fiat fra anni Venti ed anni Sessanta’ (The Professor and His Team: Strategy, Structure and Managers at Fiat 1920s–1960s'), in C. Annibaldi and G. Berta (eds), Grande impresa e sviluppo Italiano. Studio per i cento anni della Fiat (Big Business and Italian Development: Studies for the Fiat Centenary) (Bologna, 1999), pp.247–343. The Fiat structure was set by Giovanni Agnelli and Vittorio Valletta. Giovanni Agnelli was the founder of Fiat. Valletta was a professional manger who joined the company in 1920. Valletta became President of Fiat in 1946 and retained that role until 1966 when Ganni Agnelli, the grandson of the Fiat founder, took over the presidency. The reference is to R. Nelson and S. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA, 1982). The evolutionary theory of economic change refers to routines as established and repetitive practices within a given firm. Routines play the role that genes play in biological evolutionary theory. They are hereditary features of the firm and are selectable in the sense that firms with certain routines may do better than others, and, if so, their relative importance in the population is augmented over time. Ibid., pp.14–18. The main sources utilised in this article are: Archivio Storico Fiat (hereafter ASF), Verbali dei Consigli di Amministrazione’ (Fiat Historical Archive, ‘Reports of the Administration Board Meetings’) 1960–66; ASF, Libro dei numeri di matricola delle vetture prodotte (Production File), 1968–87; ASF, Fondo Sepin (Employment File), 1960–78, 5/VIII/1/A; F. Malandri and A. Scimone, Department of Production Technology Development, Fiat Auto, interview with the author, 18 March 1999. Note that Camuffo and Volpato idenified three technological phases at Fiat, namely rigid automation (1961–1974), flexible automation (1975–1988) and integrated automation (1989–1994). They suggested that within each of those phases, developments appeared to be incremental and path-dependent, whereas between each of those phases technological change was non-linear and systemic. This article, on the other hand, suggests continuity between the first two phases, as the development of robotics shared the same underpinning of hard automation, namely the quest for cycle time minimisation as opposed to flexibility maximisation. See A. Camuffo and G. Volpato, ‘Dynamic Capabilities and Manufacturing Automation: Organisational Learning in the Italian Automobile Industry’, Industrial and Corporate Change, 5, 3, (1996), pp. 813–38. The obvious reference is to M. Piore and C.F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York, 1984). See: K. Dohse, U. Jürgens and T. Ma