The period of American industrial mobilization, its preparation, deployment, and expansion during the Cold War, was a moment of profound reconfiguration for American management and its relationship with heterogeneity and differences. Using the case of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, studied between 1941 and 1946, we describe this historical movement. Using a previously unpublished archive (the Shipworker Journal) and related sources, we examine in particular the metamorphoses of management from the perspective of the women, minorities, and disabled workers mobilized at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Our work reveals the continuities, reinforcements, and discontinuities at work in the management practices and techniques of the period, and the role of multiple differences embedded in US industrial mobilization.
