Customizing Customization
Topics
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 standardization of management theory — or, more exactly, continuation of the standardization mentality that has long pervaded such theory. Since the days of Frederick Taylor, the notion that managers should single-mindedly pursue the “one best way” has led management writers to seize on one solution or another (or, more often, one solution and then another) as the best practice. Indeed, the enthusiasm for customization today was paralleled by an even greater enthusiasm for standardization many years ago.
What has been ignored in all this is that customization and standardization do not define alternative models of strategic action but, rather, poles of a continuum of real-world strategies. By promoting customization as the answer to what ails many organizations, we may be replacing one extreme with another. Managers need to locate their strategies along the continuum, and the role of management writers is to provide the conceptual tools to make this easier.
It is not an accident of history that customization is now promoted with the same enthusiasm with which standardization was promoted almost a century ago.
References (47)
1. A.D. Chandler, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1962); and
A.D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977).
Comment (1)
mohammad Ali