From Fordism to Franchise

Abstract Many analyses of contemporary global and national economies frame their dynamics as a shift from Fordism to a “Knowledge Economy,” which they define using varying combinations of human capital, winner-take-all dynamics, and the transition from manufacturing to services. These analyses obscure the degree to which the core dynamics instead reflect shifts in the legal regimes governing intellectual property rights and corporate organizational forms that have increased the salience of the distributional conflict over profits relative to the distributional conflict between capital and labor. De jure but not de facto corporate vertical disintegration has produced, in ideal typical terms, a three-tier economy composed of human capital and intellectual property-intensive firms, physical capitalism-intensive firms, and low-skill labor-intensive firms. The chapter proposes Franchise Economy rather than Knowledge Economy as a conceptual frame, as this better captures the legal and organizational dynamics of the contemporary global economy, including the so-called platform firms.