Caterpillar's Spatial Metamorphosis: Heavy Equipment Manufacturing in the 21st Century

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.