Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Sociology Lens

Publication Date

2026

Keywords

financialization, flexible accumulation, heavy equipment manufacturing, ideology, post-Fordism, spatial fix

Abstract

Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest heavy equipment manufacturer, grew rapidly in the 20th century before a crisis of overproduction in the early 1980s threatened its survival. In response, it launched the $2.8 billion “Plant with a Future” (PWAF) program, a sweeping material and ideological overhaul that remade the firm for the post-Fordist global economy. This article advances three interventions. First, it shows how post-Fordism as a spatial and ideological project emphasized decentralization, accountability, and customer orientation, which helped legitimize and institutionalize corporate restructuring. Second, it demonstrates that flexibilization operated as a spatial strategy, implemented through four interrelated processes: bureaucratic restructuring, production reconfiguration, financialization, and vertical disintegration. Third, it argues that post-Fordism was not a uniform paradigm, but a set of firm-level projects interpreted and operationalized in distinct ways. By focusing on heavy machinery production—an overlooked but foundational sector for extractive and construction industries—the article shows how firm-level transformations reverberate through the most environmentally consequential circuits of global capital.

Funding Source

Utkarsh Kumar declared receipt of the Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Grant 2868/FNPDR/2022) for the research of this article. This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Wiley.

Comments

First published in Sociology Lens (2026): https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.70056

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1111/johs.70056

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