Interesting insight, with India aspect trailing the blog article:
http://schulzeandwebb.com/blog/2007/01/09/japanese-repair-culture-and-distributed-manufacture/
I've just finished Cities by John Reader, on the history of cities,
and it's chock full of information and great stories.
This story, on Japanese manufacture, is lengthy but so good I have to
quote it in full:
Bicycles were extremely popular in Japanese cities at the end of
the nineteenth century, when the import of goods that Japanese
manufactures could not compete with on price — or could not make at
all — was damaging the national economy. Clearly, if bicycles could be
made in Japan, both the massive demand for an individual means of
transport and the national economy would be server at the same time.
As Jane Jacobs points out in her book The Economy of Cities, Japan
could have responded to this challenge by inviting foreign
manufacturers to establish plants in the country — though this would
have brought little profit to the Japanese themselves. Or they could
have built a factory of their own — which would have required large
investments in specialised machinery and the training of a skilled
labour force. The Japanese followed neither of these options. Instead
they exploited an indigenous talent for 'economic borrowing' — or
imitation, as non-specialists would call it. It worked like this:
Not long after the importation of bicycles had begun, large
numbers of one- and two-man repair shops sprang up in the cities.
Since imported spare parts were expensive and broken bicycles too
valuable to cannabalise, many repair shops found it worthwhile to make
replacement parts themselves — not difficult if each of the shops
specialised in making only one or two specific parts, as many did. In
this way, groups of bicycle repair shops were in effect manufacturing
entire bicycles before long, and it required only an enterprising
individual to begin buying parts on contract from the repairmen for
Japan to have the beginnings of a home-grown bicycle manufacturing
industry.
So, far from being costly to develop, bicycle manufacturing in
Japan paid for itself at every stage of its development. And the
Japanese got much more than a bicycle industry from the exercise. They
had also acquired a model for many of their other industrial
achievements: imitation and a system of reducing complex manufacturing
work to a number of relatively simple operations which could be done
in small autonomous workshops. The pattern was applied to the
production of many other goods, and underwrote the soaring economic
success of Japan during the twentieth century. Sony began life at the
end of the Second World War as a small shop making tubes on contract
for radio assemblers. The first Nikon cameras were exact copies of the
Zeiss Contax; Canon copied the Leica; Toyota Landcruisers were powered
by copies of the Chrysler straight-six engine.
Here are the reasons this is great:
* It's distributed manufacture, a network of independent units
operating as a single factory, but in a more agile way.
* It reminds us that the idea of interchangeable parts is
relatively new–and was a world-changer. It parallelised and
distributed manufacture. Are we at the level of interchangeable parts
in software yet? Despite common protocols like HTTP, I don't think so,
not quite.
* It points to an alternative to the mass manufacture and assembly
line of Fordism. The parts can be accessed separately from the
assembly, we can build our own neighbourhood factories for custom
goods! Mass manufacture doesn't imply treating workers like
interchangeable parts too! What's more, it bootstraps off mass
manufacture and makes something different out of it.
The most exciting reason?
This pattern is happening, right now, in India with mobile phones.
100s of small shops repair and rebuild phones with generic components
and reverse-engineered schematics, supported by a developed training
and tool-production infrastructure.
How long before we're seeing cheap-as-chips kit phones, assembled by
entrepreneurs harvesting the market stands of Delhi?
