A long the 70's, the flexible automation surpassed the traditional one as consequence of micreletronics development. Even supassed the traditional automation was not ,abandoned.lt took a decade to be overtaken as dominant paradigm inthe western world. Why did it happen? The hipothesis in this paper is that flexible automation proved incompatible with taylorist ways of production. Due to this reason, flexible automation could only develop with the toyotism emergence. It can be shown, also, that toyotism do not surpass fordism due to a natural superior status but due to a better match wit the new tecnological paradigm