The history of U.S. business during the past 100 years has been a story of mass production and mass distribution of standardized goods. Scholars and practitioners who examined the economic landscape have generally been drawn to large corporations that built their fortunes by transforming fragmented and heterogeneous markets into unified industries.1 At the heart of this transformation were strategies based on standardization: standardization of taste that allowed for standardized design, standardization of design that allowed for mechanized mass production, and a resulting standardization of products that allowed for mass distribution.
Recently, a growing number of economists and management scholars have declared that this era is over.2 Numerous books and articles have posited that we are witnessing the dawn of a new age of customization, an age in which new technologies, increased competition, and more assertive customers are leading firms toward customization of their products and services.3 Not surprisingly, firms that have adopted customization strategies have attracted considerable attention as models of what is expected to become commonplace in the near future.4
We begin by describing these two logics. We then argue that this conceptual polarization, which took firm root in the theory and practice of management, led management thinkers to ignore strategies that combine these logics. Put simply, this view itself represents an inappropriate... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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