Evaluating Change Management in an Indian Commercial Vehicle Manufacturing Firm

The Overall Context Underlying the Need for Change Management in TruckCo’s Plant ManCo

In order to disguise the identity of respondents, some of whom are still working in the firm, the ethical convention of assigning pseudonyms to employees, firms, plants and geographical locations is widely adhered in qualitative research in the sociology of work, industrial relations (IR) and human resource management (HRM), and organizational studies is followed here (BSA, 2002). Annexure 1 provides a ready reference of the pseudonyms that I have assigned to employees, their work sites and the firm and case study plant’s organizational hierarchy chart. The change management programme was conceived by TruckCo’s corporate management which operated out of corporate headquarters in Madras. It is one of India’s oldest commercial vehicle manufacturing firms and has for a long period of time dominated the bus and commercial vehicle transportation market in India. It had plants near Bangalore, Madras, Jaipur and Nagpur, and more recently in Pantnagar in the state of Uttarakhand in India.

ManCo was TruckCo’s ageing plant in Hosur in southern India near Bangalore, manufacturing engines primarily for commercial vehicles, intermittently for marine and industrial applications and medium-duty trucks and commercial vehicles. ManCo was established in 1982. ManCo employs about 2,000 people, consisting of permanent cadres of operators, in both manufacturing and administration, senior managers, middle managers who comprise the executive cadre, management trainees on probation, contractual operative staff, cleaners and other categories of casual workers. Its employee profile comprised managers who had varying career trajectories and personal aspirations. It had a long and chequered history of IR conflict. It was an unionized plant comprising a communist trade union, two trade unions affiliated to the two Dravidian parties and one union lead by an external trade union leader from Bangalore who was related to the late George Fernandes with each trade union fighting for greater legitimacy and acceptance among its plants workers.

In the net composition of the labour force, including employees who work for its ancillary suppliers, ManCo is one of the biggest contributors to the local economy in the industrial conurbation of Hosur. It employs direct and indirect labour and contractual labour across a spectrum of vocational trades and skills and helps in sustaining consumption patterns of a wide array of products and services in the town.

Competition by new entrants, such as, Scania, Navistar, Volvo and others, in different commercial vehicle and passenger transportation segments threatened to claw away TruckCo’s predominant market share that it had held for a long time. Corporate management realized that it need to bring about significant changes within the firm by restructuring its labour process and organizational culture. Since lean manufacturing was for long the dominant paradigm in the automotive industry, aided by managerial consultants, they introduced GEMBA ¹ in 2008. GEMBA’s mandate in TruckCo morphed far beyond its strict Japanese textual definition to progressively endeavour to transform organizational culture and the labour process on the basis of lean manufacturing.

Accordingly, books, such as, The Machine that Changed the World (Womack, Jones & Roos, 2007) and The Toyota Way (Liker & Convis, 2004), acquired a pre-eminent position in the hearts and minds of corporate management at TruckCo headquarters and the senior managers, such as, the change management head and his deputy, through which they were driving down change at ManCo. TruckCo did not have a systematic programme of lean manufacturing in place until it was introduced first in 2008. Corporate management believed that its managers and operators had to be forcefully ushered into the new world of lean, regardless of how enthusiastic they were and develop a new mindset of teamwork and participative management.

The change management programme called ‘GEMBA’ was established upon the Japanese conflict of GEMBA. The GEMBA change management project interposed the ManCo plant organization and its labour process at its human and technical realms.

The message from the corporate headquarters and Mr X who headed the change management programme in ManCo was that the future of TruckCo could not be secured without the active participation of the operators who were portrayed as important stakeholders and who had to be brought ‘into the loop’ in order to give substance to the company’s corporate slogan, Engineering the customer’s tomorrows. Mr X was entrusted with sphere heading the change management project and had several years of experience in the automotive industry. He was in his late fifties but sought to reinvent himself by being much mentally younger and adopting the demeanour of an American football coach. He hoped that the success of the change management would be a defining achievement in his long career in the automotive industry and help him reach the TruckCo board before he hung his boots and called it a day. Mr Z his deputy was recruited specifically with a mandate of implementing change management. Mr X and Mr Z had direct access to corporate management in Madras, bypassing organizational hierarchy of TruckCo’s subsidiary plants. Mr Z was a professionally well-qualified postgraduate in industrial engineering from the renowned Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and wanted to spiral his way upwards and climb the corporate stairway quickly. His staff specialist role in TruckCo and the difficulties he faced in evangelizing GEMBA within and across the firms’ managers and organizational hierarchy personifies Dalton’s (1950) portrayal of a staff specialist.

However, since senior managers of ManCo did not expect the language of GEMBA to be embraced by its line managers and workers, without considerable management input, they sought to monitor and reward participation by, for example, using employee appraisal systems. In this way, GEMBA was specifically, directed at both middle managers and workers, with the former influencing the latter.

GEMBA and Organizational Realignment

Before introducing GEMBA, a multidisciplinary team of senior middle managers from across all departments was established in December 2006 and nearly 65 functional units were identified initially. McKinsey were hired for providing a roadmap for the effective implantation of GEMBA and they suggested that the elimination of waiting time and wasteful activity through the use of standardized job routines could be the underlying basis for a tight linkage between different stages of production and of individual job cycles which were now to be very much dependent upon each other. The internal customer concept was used to help enforce compliance with these standards by making each operator in a line, and hence the whole shop, dependent upon the preceding operator’s job cycle. The management recognized that one benefit of this way of working was that it had the potential to lead operators to ‘manage’ one another and thus enforce internal discipline and the resolution of problems without the supervision of managers.

Since these individual business units had to deliver value in terms of cost saving, management hoped that operators, self-driven continuous improvement, troubleshooting and efficient utilization of machinery, through innovation in working practices, such as, embracing multitasking, and through continuous improvement of the production process. Cumulatively, these mechanisms were intended to create a state of unrelenting tension such that operators would no longer need to be managed to optimize performance, with all the attendant IR considerations that followed naturally.

The performance of the individual shops of ManCo was to be periodically reviewed on the basis of various matrices, covering factors, such as, the cost of materials, the cost of processing and efficiency ratios, through which each unit would be moved to compete to improve its performance, both in its own terms and in terms of other shops, brought about GEMBA’s new ‘Seven Initiatives’ or N7i in company parlance with broad functional aims that were concerned primarily, but not exclusively, with GEMBA. They were:

Increase the number of GEMBA work areas

Later on, ‘safety’ was also incorporated into the Seven Initiatives list as an additional initiative. In addition to working quickly and more productively, management sold the safety measure included in the Seven Initiatives and GEMBA to the operators by suggesting them that by adopting GEMBA, operators finish work faster by being methodical and thereby pre-empt injuries or accidents and be better equipped to deal with eventualities if and when they occurred, provided periodic guidelines on safety given to them under the above framework were adhered. Implicit in the design of GEMBA and the Seven Initiatives was that workers would then assume more of the responsibility for their own and their colleagues’ safety, thereby reducing the burden on management.

These seven initiative areas of activity formed the framework through which GEMBA was transmitted to section heads, middle managers and operators. These initiatives were envisaged to be the lynchpin of bringing about organizational change by corporate management. I will now address how GEMBA intervened in reconstructing the shop floor and hence the organizational structure.

Linking GEMBA with Managerial Appraisal

The promotion of middle managers, hitherto based on seniority plus the recommendation of the section head, had an added component successful management of the lean manufacturing milestones. In the recent past, consideration for promotion had depended primarily on whether someone was due for promotion almost as a matter of rote, although a favourable outcome was very much dependent on a positive recommendation from a section head. Hereupon, however, with reference to the case of line managers, appraisal for promotion focused on several criteria: their management of production tasks, their achievement of targets decided in conjunction with GEMBA parameters, their diligence and commitment in supervising GEMBA improvement projects and their interaction with operators to implement GEMBA. Furthermore, such appraisal took account of their achievements against specific targets that had been entrusted within each of the ‘Seven Initiatives’ areas.

Production-related changes were critical for the realization of GEMBA objectives. Corporate management went at great lengths to emphasize the important role that TruckCo’s middle managers would play in implementing these and other measures to achieve a lean manufacturing environment. Now the phrase core delivery areas (CDA) became a crucial part of GEMBA parlance and attempts were made to appraise managers on the basis of their achievements in relation to an array of CDA parameters. These targets were set periodically in GEMBA review meetings attended by Mr X, managers from other relevant departments and the appropriate news. In designing these CDAs, Mr X reviewed reports from the ITVs, sought the active participation of production heads and also addressed problems identified by middle managers in related departments. These targets were then periodically revised and reviewed when corporate management in Madras called in the general manager (GM) Mr DS, who was in the overall plant head of ManCo, and Mr X and his change management team. As a result, Mr X and other senior managers not only emphasized the responsibility of middle managers to meet these CDA targets but also claimed that because these managers had been consulted during the process of their preparation, they had to take ownership of these CDA targets.

By January 2009, Mr Z a key participant in the appraisal realignment process informed me that, from then on, the participation and performance parameters of the middle manager and the operators they supervised would be revisited and from that time period assessed against their attainment of CDA targets and that this would drive their CDA appraisal process by their section heads. This stance clearly contrasted sharply with the previous practice of promotion depending upon length of service and periodic section head’s confidential performance and competency appraisal reports. The manner in which GEMBA intervened to monitor manager performance but had limited success is discussed below.

However, overworked line managers saw this as an additional burden where they had to satisfy two contrasting expectations. An important component of their appraisal consisted in satisfying their section heads to work at a frenetic pace to keep the line intact. Contrarily, they had to be answerable to the GEMBA team for their appraisal which had to match their expectations, which had a long-term developmental orientation and also composed of bringing about immediate innovations to the line, introduce incremental modifications to the job cycle by taking reluctant operators all of which had to be done while keeping the line running in full steam ahead.

GEMBA and Periodic Rotation of Managers

In addition to changing the terms of appraisal to focus on their adherence to GEMBA, senior management thought that moving middle managers around production areas on a regular basis would motivate them by presenting fresh troubleshooting challenges. More importantly, this would render tenuous any loyalties they might tend to form with particular groups of workers with whom they shared the daily grind of production. In this way, undue sympathy towards their colleagues would first be neutralized and then, later, would be replaced by an overriding commitment to the company’s aims and interests.

For instance, the GM Mr DS of the ManCo plant told me during my fieldwork that one of the outcomes for him from my study would be to highlight the ‘old man of the sea’ syndrome. Here, the metaphor from Ernest Hemingway’s caricature of the old fisherman in his novel, the Old Man and the Sea, described middle managers who had become set in the ways of their departments and incapable of thinking more laterally. As an illustration of his ideas being implemented, subsequent to my exit from the field, I learned that the GM Mr DS had directed the human resource (HR) department to adopt a proactive attitude towards job rotation. They were instructed to move around operators in ManCo and well-entrenched veteran middle managers from one shop to another within ManCo and from ManCo to other plants.

The seven new initiatives and the related GEMBA measures, which sought to improve employee communication, motivation and reward, were all intended to unsettle that state of habitual adjustment between section heads and the middle managers. It did so by attempting to make middle managers liaise with other, different, operators with the intention of not simply extracting production from them, but instead working with them as team members through kaizenning. In this way, the company hoped to push operators and middle managers voluntarily to arrive at ‘outside the box’ solutions.

This policy job rotation was implemented and was primarily intended to unsettle any sense of accomplished familiarity that managers or workers could develop over time with their colleagues or machines in the same area and instead develop cross-functionality among them. This was despite the likelihood that such moves would disturb continuity and synergy between middle managers and the operators they oversaw.

Regular Feedback Mechanisms from Middle Managers and Close Scrutiny of their Activities

The management hierarchies established by the GEMBA project team played an important role in monitoring the ‘Seven Initiatives’ goals and employee performance, but in so doing they also provided scope for senior managers to monitor the performance of middle managers. Each ITV liaised with other LILs and interacted with the LULs of other plants as well as the mother plant in which they were stationed. The ITVs convened meetings to review and assess the progress made on each of the ‘Seven Initiatives’ and heard reasons why the required progress had not been made. Minutes were produced and detailed reports, comprising PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and other documents that encapsulated a wide array of performance parameters, were prepared by the ITV using data drawn from the middle managers. These were shown to the head of mission GEMBA, Mr X, who would, from time to time, make suggestions for the actions he thought necessary.

The preparation of PowerPoint slides and parameter trackers pertaining to quality, component standardization, reducing inventory etc., all important constituents of any template of lean manufacturing which might be compared with an array of aspects being tracked on an oscilloscope, eventually occupied much of the time and commitment of middle managers, though they also had their section heads to satisfy. Reports of daily meetings discussing these trackers would be taken back to review meetings convened by Mr X, which involved the plant head Mr DS and, if necessary, the ITV, and this meeting then sent a report to corporate headquarters; this explains the chain of command in decision-making on these reports. The soft copies of the trackers were translated into data sheets, and middle managers had to tally the data properly to ensure clarity and factual accuracy, since errors would incur the annoyance of both Mr X and his assistants.

However, enervated line managers could not always meet these deadlines which corporate management set for them. They visualized these deadlines through an aseptic lens on a milestone to milestone basis, which had to be met to the best extant possible. They would accommodate anomalies of the data and show promising figures which Mr X and his deputy Mr Z would take to the aforementioned meetings with corporate management at Madras. Corporate management knew fully well that these trackers did not present an accurate picture of ManCo but would look the other way, hoping that over time managers would come around with tangible improvements since after all Rome was not built in a day. In meetings with corporate management, the staff specialist Mr Z used tact and diplomacy, albeit interlaced with threats that middle managers’ progress, promotion and bonuses would be impeded if their non-cooperation was made known during progress meetings at corporate headquarters; he could always rely on Mr Xdown whose intervention was more direct and brought immediate results because of his senior position in the management hierarchy.

I have so far discussed the structural organizational changes associated with GEMBA and how evolving changes in the labour process affected managerial motivation and monitored operators’ work. The people spearheading the programme, like Mr X, believed that GEMBA would succeed if (with the cooperation of their middle managers and using these tools) management could sufficiently influence a ‘critical mass’ of workers to create momentum or reach a ‘tipping point’ (a phrase Mr X borrowed from his favourite book The Tipping Point (Gladwell, 2007)). However, corporate management’s policies seemingly countervailed the impact of the GEMBA rhetoric on workers.

The Wider Agenda of Senior Management Policy and its Implications for GEMBA

I will address senior management policy initiatives that ran in parallel to GEMBA because they were integral to the success of GEMBA and they will provide a better understanding of the overall pattern and process of change management at ManCo, within which GEMBA policies and their reception can be understood. These three areas are, first, a broad imperative to cut labour costs, which had repercussions for work reorganization, redundancies and subcontracting; second, the implementation of just in time (JIT) and Kanban policies as additional features of a pursuit of lean manufacturing whose outcome was in turn affected subcontracting work to external suppliers; and, third, the relationship between purchasing new equipment with higher levels of automation and refurbishing and reorganizing the use of older machines.

Discussion and Review of the Literature

As seen above, empowerment and self-initiative were integral part of the GEMBA rhetoric being pushed down to line managers and workers. I will relate GEMA to the literature to the partial and emergent nature of realization of templates of work organization and that there is no one best way. Regimes of work organization, such as, lean manufacturing, are moulded by contextual factors, such as, state, political economic regimes of accumulation, local managerial templates, changing managerial repertoires, local organizational dynamics and evolving patterns of IR. Finally, any template of organizational transformation in India interacts with the context of changing but persisting Indian organizational ethos.

Wilkinson and Dundon (2010) identify the main features of direct participation of employees:

Information sharing: Information on management plans and challenges is passed downwards to employees to win them over and make them empathize with its business decisions and challenges in order to bring out greater employee commitment.

However, detractors of employee participation couched in the nurturing and empowering vocabularies of soft individualizing HRM seeking to displace conventional IR, point out that its ramifications for employees in practice might remain unrecognized by advocates who herald participation and empowerment as the stepping-stone towards employee commitment and organizational excellence.

Trenchant sceptics about empowerment and indeed many of the detailed ethnographic studies (Delbridge, 1998; Durand & Hatzfeld, 2003; Graham, 1995; Rinehart, Huxley & Robertson, 1997); challenge the unexamined narrative of lean manufacturing of conventional managerial self-help literature. They point out that the main goal of empowerment is a shift away from joint regulation to forms of participation that do not challenge the management prerogative. Sometimes ‘empowerment’ is specifically framed in terms of eliciting the efforts of individual employees, but more often, where it is directed at clusters or ‘teams’ of workers, it is management that generally defines the parameters and objectives of such ‘teamwork’, thus undermining with any autonomous self directed teamwork which is how empowerment ended up being in ManCo having mixed results with regard to being process oriented and some measure of continuous improvement but with little self-initiative or self-management.

Unsurprisingly, critics of lean manufacturing feel that lean manufacturing templates could be ad hoc and have little or no worker participation. However, the advocates of lean manufacturing, such as, Womack et al. (2007), tend to advocate it as a total package of techniques that need to be adopted as a basis for major productivity gains based on a transformation of employment and production relations with line managers and production management interloping into what was considered as the domain of the HRM. This package encapsulates new forms of team working, just-in-time production, direct worker responsibility for quality and kaizen. Furthermore, they argue that such innovations generate new, more harmonious and cooperative relationships among workers and between workers and managers, characterized by the practical empowerment of workers on the shop floor. It incorporates the main tenets of total quality management (TQM) schemes and high involvement models.

Within the framework of lean manufacturing and empowerment, teamwork has long been recognized as an important feature of Japanese corporations that emerged out of a specific national historical and institutional context (Pudelko in Haak & Pudelko, 2004, p. 189; Sako, 2006, pp. 108–113). Team work implies reorganizing work tasks: It is a socialization device aimed at overcoming conflicts between employees and especially between management and workers. In the context of the manufacturing industry, Danford (1998, citing Buchanan 410) identifies the main attributes of team work in the context of modes of work organization, such as, lean manufacturing which are ‘minimum manning, multi-tasking, multi-machine operation, predefined work operations, repetitive short-cycle work, powerful first line supervisors, and a conventional managerial hierarchy’.

These features of team work differ from the team work of the Swedish socio-technical mode of work organization, where operators manage themselves within their team with a lesser degree of managerial intervention as compared to lean manufacturing (Danford, 1998, p. 410). Workers in the socio-technical mode of work organization completed a number of complex but varied tasks which provide with them avenues to apply their intelligence and discretion and do a great variety of operational tasks with long cycle times, unlike lean manufacturing, where the main components of job routines and cycle times are clearly spelt out by management. However, as the NUMMI experiment study shows both the Volvo and NUMMI (Adler & Cole, in Sandberg, 1995, pp. 157–179) plant were replaced by tighter managerial control of the labour process with management-driven kaizen.

Critics of kaizen demonstrate that worker control is limited to the area of work methods, and even there it is constrained by the parameters of the production process as a whole. SIA, the case study company of Graham (1995), summarized the core message of kaizen as that of always searching for a better way. Thus, on the one hand, workers were expected to make suggestions and continuously take part in improving their productive efficiency, eliminating waste in their bodily movements and reducing the cycle time of their job routine. But, on the other hand, management persistently intervened in this process, through constant time study (Graham, 1995, p. 106) and appropriate workers’ creative tacit knowledge to ‘use it to its advantage’. On this basis, Graham argues that a combination of kaizenning, JIT and team work concentrated the work, increased peer pressure through team work and accelerated the pace of work. In her view, kaizenning led operators to feel that their knowledge was being appropriated, and indeed she agrees that it formed a means through which management attempted continually to gain control over workers’ creative knowledge and use it for its own advantage. It also meant constant disruption as changes in the workstation were suddenly introduced which could be disruptive to older brownfield plants, such as, ManCo, interfering with the learning of work routines and undermining the scope for finding some space in the process, or ‘making out’. Graham (1995, p. 106) who draws this term from the sociologist Michael Burawoy (1985), uses ‘making out’ to mean ‘The idea that workers play games to create spare time yet still make quotas and, by doing so develop a consensual relationship with production was effectively undermined at SIA.’ Just when a worker had a station under control with a few seconds to spare, he or she ran the risk of being kaizened, as management intensified the job by appropriating that worker’s knowledge of ways of saving time in the job routine and therefore convoluting the making out process.

In summary, then, studies like that of Graham argue that kaizenning is not only designed to capture workers’ appropriate workers tacit knowledge and spare time but also when, how and where these ideas are implemented. The literature contests the linear input output paradigm of kaizen. In ManCo’s context, these granular studies brought introduced through the effort and ergonomics initiative were congruent with kaizenning measures in continually eliciting suggestions from workers in working faster and harder rather than smarter. These developments precipitated anxiety and tension among workers who thought management would eventually supplant their skills with more multifunctional machines and rapidly scale up the job routine without supplementing the workface. Union activists saw this as yet another insidious ploy by management of work intensification on ManCo’s overworked workers.

Parker and Slaughter (1989, p. 74) identify the main attractions and pitfalls of JIT for corporate managements like TruckCo who tend to be bedazzled by presentations made to them by consultants. The point out the deleterious ramifications JIT had for operators and hence lead to low morale which in turn accentuated passive and active resistance:

A JIT program can mean big corporate savings: less capital tied up in work in process, lower costs of warehousing and material handling, scrap, and faster delivery to customers. But the costs of JIT borne by workers are speed-up, the loss of buffers and therefore the ability to vary the pace of work, enormous pressure on the job, and loss of jobs.

JIT minimizes buffer stocks between processes by delivering components as needed and seeks to move products continuously along the production line. According to the advocates of lean manufacturing, this makes the production process more transparent, leaves problems and faults visible for all to see and exposes the ability of workers and managers to ‘hide behind’ surplus components. These features are symbolized by the beeping of the ‘andon’ lights when the line has to stop. As a result, the company is able to visualize product flow and inventories, and mistakes in the production process can be seen and rectified. In theory, this should deliver line stability and flexibility at the same time. A consequence of JIT is that operators are on their toes all the time and because components are timed to be exhausted and replenished at the start and end of a tightly timed job routine, respectively, and, that workers are under substantial pressure to complete a sequence of tightly coupled tasks within their job routine.

The JIT ecosystem to be effective, warrants carefully timed operators’ job routines, meticulous calibration bodily movement and judicious evaluation of time taken for each operation. However, as discussed earlier, varying levels of supplier preparedness and logistics in ManCo also made it difficult for TruckCo’s management to think of implementing JIT completely across all work areas of the plant barring its exemplar areas. These disruptions made the ageing ManCo plant vulnerable even as TruckCo’s managers tried to cut down labour costs even while requiring cheap labour.

Rinehart et al. [1997] identified three integral components of kaizenning policies in their study of CAMI. These policies comprised of:- elimination of production buffers and making operators to isolate and eliminate production related errors pre-emptively in order to minimise line stoppages and speed up their line further and the pursuance of unrelenting kaizenning to optimise their job routines. However, the outcome brought by these kaizenning measures threatened to reduce the number of workers in each team, with visible consequences for work intensity and worker wellbeing, which became a big bone of contention between the workers (and their union) and management. The CAMI case study (Rinehart et al., 1997) also points out the importance of management-led kaizen teams alongside operator-led kaizenning, which lead to the implementation of management-designed measures without taking on board operators’ opinions. Though worker suggestions could lead to cost saving and improvement in the efficiency of operations on the assembly line, such suggestions were often not recognized, while rather routine or mundane suggestions were highlighted just to give the impression that workers were genuinely involved in the kaizen process. This then led to disenchantment among workers and their non-cooperation with management and it was managerial ad-hocism would prevail more often than note.

More broadly, kaizenning often intensified the pace of work, which made operators sceptical about management’s discourse that it empowered workers. Against this background, the workers and the union at CAMI were only prepared to accept kaizen if it matched a worker’s interest. This perception was similar to the perception of ManCo’s perception that kaizen should be resisted if it intensifies work and makes it more stressful. In addition, if lean manufacturing translates into the company’s inability to accommodate older or injured workers, it should be opposed. Rinehart et al. (1997, pp. 185–186) and Shimizu (2000) classified kaizen into one form that is led by the supervision of senior management and the middle managers as a part of their functional roles and another kind of kaizen which stems out of suggestions offered by workers through quality circles and a suggestion system. Kaizenning changes in Japanese firms, such as, for instance, redesign of production lines in practice and any other far-reaching production-related changes, came through working of integrated teams of managers. Kaizenning for workers was viewed ‘as training them to look for problems, searching measures to take and solving problems’ (Shimizu, 2000, p. 14). In practice, major production-related operational changes are imposed from above. These far-reaching changes lead to widely known ‘management by stress’ (Parker & Slaughter, 2001, p. 74) and inevitably have to be accepted by workers which gives very little room to manoeuvre for workers.

These ethnographic literatures appraise detailed accounts of the day-to-day operation of lean manufacturing policies and the shop floor responses to these policies. They show that management policies and worker responses vary, and these variations are linked to wider contextual differences between the companies and workplaces involved. First, some of these case studies are of greenfield sites, but many involve firms and workplaces with a much longer history. In this regard, Durand and Hatzfeld (2003, p. 160) make an important point about continuities between Fordist production and lean manufacturing. Team work is often imposed over plants that have much older supervisory arrangements. In their case study, standardized work, short job cycles, line-based work, JIT pull processes and several layers of production management precluded anything other than the most mundane existing team discretion, underlining that in such circumstances, management only implements what it prioritizes at a given point of time even if the results are partial and incomplete. Durand and Hatzfeld (2003, p. 44) suggest that management at Peugeot attempted to ‘rationalize’ the line to halve cycle time and double the speed of the operators, and that it was these targets that were crucial to management, rather than imposing discipline on workers as an end by itself. This production in ManCo resembled the pattern outlined by Durand and Hatzfeld (2003), which targets controlled worker and line manager behaviour and puts them in a continued state of frenetic tension and subdued state of persistent antagonism among managers themselves and their superiors and between managers and workers.

However, even within this seemingly inflexibly and top-down model, there was negotiation and adjustment between different agents (Durand & Hatzfield, 2003, p. 107). First, within the quality-monitoring process there was perpetual ongoing negotiation and readjustment between different departments. Second, they note that the notion of quality in the lean manufacturing process has now become all encompassing and subsumes such issues as negligence and discipline, which were traditionally the subject of negotiation between the worker’s representatives and management. As such, the quality control system acts as a source of pressure but also forms a (limited) space for negotiations and adjustment between actors. Durand and Hatzfeld (2003, pp. 172–175) explore a multi-levelled field of negotiation between the production control department, the programme controllers and the assembly line managers with their supervisors, and at the two ends the sales department, which procures the orders and provides the rigid yardstick within which negotiation occurs. These complex multileveled relationships were decisive in predicting the outcome of change management in Manco. For instance, TruckCos’, model changes that required new parts lists often involved the redundancy of old parts with distinctive specifications, but these remained and coexisted in the stores and on the system. The model change had altered the required quantities of specific parts, with some needing to be either partially or wholly discontinued. Thus, items could become obsolete after engineering design changes, meaning that the ManCo inventory store stock was no longer current for the manufacture and had been replaced by expected designs. However, some managers were worried that components procured with specifications pertaining to an earlier vehicle model could not be allowed to go to waste and would try to adapt them if possible to the next sub-assembly. The ad hoc and seasonal nature of market demand undermined the potency of lean manufacturing in an old plant, which was based on carefully planned changes in production within the same platform.

Durand and Hatzfield (2003) also point out that detailed operating rules in the assembly plant are never absolute but are in a perpetual state of redefinition and interpretation, at least by management. At the same time, they also register the strengths and weaknesses of trade union efforts to contest management’s lean manufacturing policies, the strengths being linked to a longstanding tradition of militant workplace unionism while the weaknesses reflect increasing divisions among workers, especially along educational and generational lines which was so typical of ManCo whose workers belong to different generations and had distinctive aspirations with a younger generation eager to mimic their counterparts in the IT workplaces in Bangalore and an older generation scalded by older memories of industrial conflict willing to fade away but not without a fight. Second, the implementation of lean manufacturing is also influenced by changing pressures on the plant, reflecting both changes in product markets and shifting senior management agendas.

The CAMI study (Rinehart et al., 1997) reinforces the critique of Womack et al. (2007) who celebrate optimistic premises of lean manufacturing as a return of job enrichment and intelligence of the worker, which were undermined by the evolving policy priorities of CAMI management which could change track at short notice as it did in TruckCo. The talk of empowerment was very real at the outset and was represented by the practices of a few managers, but their departure had real consequences for many operators’ prospects of empowerment. Furthermore, job rotation and flexibility were often ignored when production demands intensified. When market conditions dictated production, much of the empowerment rhetoric was abandoned and the aspect of lean manufacturing that increased the pace of production replaced the empowerment rhetoric. Additionally, many of the specifications in the lean manufacturing manual of the company were rendered irrelevant because of rapid shifts in market demand and the product mix that was needed for the day. Changing conditions, especially in product demand, were so rapid that it was impossible to keep lean manufacturing manuals constant, which meant that the lean manufacturing system was subject to continuous modification and compromise because the standards and baselines kept shifting in response to every crisis of production.

In the CAMI case study (Rinehart et. al., 1997, p. 177), one manager observed:

When you’re not at full production you have the luxury of a lot of things—a slower line or downtime. There was time for people to work on suggestions, head over to repair to work on a quality program. Now that we’re at full production, we have to run at maximum speed and everyone is assigned to their teams, and that’s pretty much it.

The above discussion correlates with the earlier observation of Marsden (in Edwards, 2003, p. 348), that a ‘developmentalist discourse’ could be quickly displaced by a more urgent cost reduction or Hyman’s ‘bleak house model’ discourse leading to ‘direct control’ (Friedman, 1977). Moreover Delbridge’s (1998) comparative ethnography of two factories which he labels Nippon Co and Valley Co, respectively—one characterized by the capacity of management to insulate the workplace from many sources of uncertainty, and the other characterized by being buffeted by a turbulent environment—underlines the ways in which such wider conditions influence the policy options open to plant management and the whole character of the ‘negotiated order’ of inter managerial and management worker relationships.

The literature including that of the regulationist school (Aglietta & Rebérioux, 2005; Boyer, 1998; Freyssenet & Boyer, 2009) has an inherent tendency to treat lean manufacturing as a distinct and complete production system whose effects ramify uniformly within and across the labour process, though Boyer and Freyssenet are also at pains to emphasize the contextual and contingent nature of the functioning of such ‘production systems’. Thus, the implementation of new modes of work organization intended to bring about changes in production is often selective and piecemeal because management actors had to interpret the relevance of varying ‘production models’ during the process of their application in different production environments, and under different pressures. This is illustrated by Freyssenet and Boyer (2009, p. 10):

For example, some people assimilated Toyota’s lean flows with Honda’s responsiveness, yet the former implied rigorous production planning whereas the latter was based on innovation rents derived from innovative models being launched before competitors could copy them. What followed was the construction of a number of systems that were cut off from their original objectives and even contradicted them on occasion, leading to some disappointing results. The sum total of best practices can only be transformed into profits for a firm if they are compatible with one another.

Implicit in their belief is that any unsuccessful modification of such systems as a product of the failure to implement the key tenets of the model because of the impact of macro-structural contingencies, instead of addressing the contested micro-political nature of the workplace that underlies the implementation of managerial policy. Boyer (1998), Durand (2007), Freyssenet, Mair, Shimizu and Volpato (1998) and Freyssenet and Boyer (2009) suggest that the adoption and adaptation of modes of work organization, such as, lean manufacturing, are contingent, often piecemeal and are conditioned by the context and institutional framework they operate under. Thus, the regulationist strand of literature attempts to characterize changing modes of work organization and their impact on the labour process and on relationships between the various constituents of the plant which from ManCo’s perspective comprised machinery of varying age; stargazing corporate management that in recapitulation was imprisoned by its own imagery of transforming its corporate image into to a Google-like campus as a lean and agile workplace even before it could implement change effectively; grizzled line managers who had seen many a managerial fad come and go; subtle, friendly, obsequious when warranted but yet unfathomable mazes of internalized antagonistic relationships among line managers, superiors and recalcitrant workers. All these components interacted with a changing external context of suppliers of varying stature, dependability and efficiency, cyclical Indian commercial vehicle markets requiring cost-effective product which were not over engineered and episodic global economic recessionary cycles.

Regulation theory literature (Boyer and Drache, 1998) contextualises these interactions in relation to political and economic transformations comprising of three components which ensue from above which are:- changing paradigms of production and consumption; changes brought about in relation to suppliers; and the consequences for corporate decision-making, all of which are related to fluctuating world automobile markets and globalisation. Local contexts, trade union configurations, market conditions or state policy, have crucial bearings on the development and functioning of management repertoires. Consequently, Boyer (1998b, pp. 23–56) while advancing his thesis on hybridization of regimes of work organization argues that no mode of manufacturing technology is exclusively coterminous with any single organizational form and that neither is there in any society a particular organizational model that is so strong that specific societal effects become irrelevant.

Contrastively, mainstream management guru literature (Peters, 1987, 1997) and Harvard Business Review (HBR) case studies implicitly assume that lean manufacturing as a palliative silver bullet which once implemented correctly as an input would, in its output, be both linear and homogeneous in its impact within and across an organization’s organizational structure and culture. They fail to acknowledge a persistent dialectic of the aspiration for change versus the obduracy of resilient continuity that undergirds all change management programmes which has be identified by practitioners of IR and critical management studies disciplines. Rubinstein and Kochan (2001), who systematically traced the evolution and limitations of the change management, attributed the following underlying assumptions that formed the basis of the essential tension between continuity and an experimental or aspirational state: ‘Within the American Car Industry, managers wished to measure up to Japanese efficiency, workers sought employment stability with a say in management decisions.’

Moreover, literature of Indian managerial repertories suggests that they are in a state of flux. Sudhir Kakkar et al. (2006), Pio (2007) and Rai (2012) delineate specific features of Indian managerial practices and the stress these practices are undergoing in the post-liberalization era. In India, diverse labour markets of varying skills and managerial templates that were built on fealty and loyalty structures and patron and client relationships within diverse managerial constituencies implied that dominance effects were eclipsed by societal effects. Therefore, while managerial templates and repertoires in India exhibit transition, they continue to exist in a nebulous region between tradition and novelty. Kakar et al. (2006) point out that historically managerial practices in India have been characterized by hierarchical social relations. However, these managerial practices have not been authoritarian but rather have been framed by an underlying authoritative leadership style in superordinate–subordinate relationships, characterized by paternalistic care for subordinates, including showing affection, taking personal interest in the well-being of employees and commitment to their growth. Organizationally prevalent tendencies to centralize power and a strong feeling of status consciousness (Kakkar et al., 2006, p. 106) inherent in the Indian managerial practice of organizational mobility are considered important for internal promotions gained by emphasizing loyalty and dependability rather than efficiency (Gopalan & Stahl, 2006). There is also a strong reliance on social contacts and the accommodation of family members, relatives or friends in their HRM strategies (Pio, 2007, p. 326), because of the belief that the group is more important than the individual (Gopalan & Stahl, 2006). According to Rai (2012, p. 26), these hierarchical characteristics continue to coexist in HR practices, even in the present, with high power distance in working relationships; centralization, resulting in minimal downward decision-making in organizations; and paternalism, resulting in difficulties in adhering to stringent and objective performance systems within modern HR systems, and leading to ‘adhocism’ and subjective relationships. These subjective features identified in the literature interacted with changing career pathways of younger ambitious managers and workers versus older careerist managers and even workers who had spent their careers in ManCo which cumulatively affected the outcome of GEMBA.