This article, based on ethnographic research in an automobile factory in Turkey, examines workers' politics in the construction and reproduction of ‘total quality management’. The central argument is that workers devise hidden ‘ways of making do’ with managerial strategies in their challenge to specific managerial regimes in their areas of weakness. These hidden forms of resistance form the building blocks of working class struggle as they create and nurture a counter-hegemonic discourse, resistant subcultures, and elementary forms of more conscious political activity.
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