Abstract
After nearly 40 years, there is a common understanding of what is meant by the term ‘lean production’ among labour and employment sociologists. That said, as a set of manifest and latent management strategies designed to resolve capital’s perceived productivity problem in the last quarter of the 20th century, lean remains disputed, and especially for those at the sharp end of what is in fact a powerful ideological discourse. Something of a curate’s egg, this book promises a progressive prospectus for lean, saving it from management ineptitude (and complacency) and its misguided, if sometimes worthy, rejection, by labour-trade union activists and critical labour scholars alike. The research, conducted over 15 years ago, entailed extensive fieldwork involving in-depth interviews with more than 100 employees, field observation and participation in 31 manufacturers in three US Midwest states over three years. The book sets out to challenge radical trade unionists and critical labour scholars by pointing out what Vidal considers their limited perspective, which though differing in a number of ways, together are myopic to the benefits of lean. Moreover, while conceding that the criticisms made by radical researchers may have some traction, these are seen to have salience in highly competitive product assembly sectors such as automotives. For Vidal, radical trade unionists and critical labour scholar activists are mistaken because in interpreting lean as an inherent assault on employment standards, they are only able to see it as a driver of labour subordination. Describing his orientation as that of a historical materialist, Vidal sets out to put the record straight, in particular for left-rejectionists.
Recognising lean variants, Vidal distinguishes between those sectors implementing high-performance, high-involvement labour routines, and those defined by cost-driven, still Fordist, manufacturing practices. In this short review, I confine my comments to a limited range of aspects of what I understand to be his argument.
For Vidal, disagreements about the virtues of lean revolve around an understanding of the idea of empowerment, the virtue of which is misunderstood by radical critics. He argues that there are indeed lean variants that in some instances do not lead to worker-empowerment. However, empowerment, the central promise delivered by high-performance organisations, offers the ‘better’ version of lean. Here we meet one of four related problems with this book.
First, much is made of the notion of contradiction and, while conceding that radical critics in certain instances have valid objections, Vidal argues that the reason for the negative responses reported by radical scholars is, inter alia, due to a social-cultural reluctance on the part of many workers who still inhabit a ‘Fordist’ socio-cultural milieu. If only workers could somehow see the virtues of lean, then the dream of progressive social democratic (I stylise) involvement would deliver the fruits promised by its Japanese progenitors. Yet, since managers alone cannot be trusted, success requires positive union engagement. Perhaps the main problem with this view is that one might expect an historical materialist to search for structural contradictions based upon irreducible social class antagonisms.
This is symptomatic of a significant issue at the heart of the thesis. The problem is not that Vidal’s research throws out a challenge to radical critics, presenting alternative facts (something such as, ‘their’ research ignores positive worker commitment while ‘mine’ takes commitment seriously). Nor is the problem that he wants to merge what he takes to be an historical materialist with what might be termed social democratic form of ‘capture’ of the ‘better’ elements of ‘lean’.
This problem with the idea of ‘contradiction’ is especially evident in the second problem identified: the book seems not to be able to distinguish between structural antagonisms, viz dialectical contradictions rooted in the class nature of society, and contradictions based upon differing interpretations, or misunderstanding, of common problems. That is to say that, for example, the distinctions made between worker and management contradictions in chapters seven and eight, respectively, are not structural antagonisms, seen from the standpoint of an historical materialist. As if unconnected, and immediately prior to a discussion on management contradictions, he writes that the actual, the real dialectical contradiction, driving differences of perspectives held by managers and workers in their own contexts, is that of extant capitalist society and since this will not change any time soon, neither will worker antipathy (p. 234). The whole would have benefitted from a consideration of Lucio Colletti’s distinction between dialectical and non-dialectical contradictions. This is associated with another concern. Specifically, the book seems to take for granted ideas, standpoint differences and the formulation of concepts as reducible to what advocates of lean say they are. The most obvious being that of ‘empowerment’, which as I have said is critical to the book’s narrative. Empowerment is a difficult concept because it is always fought over, never properly resolved in the context of workplace antagonism and certainly unintelligible in the absence of an understanding of the workplace politics of social subordination. Recognition of this tension is apparently absent in the book. This is another way of saying that a historical materialist might anticipate a view of empowerment as being radically different from that of a manager, let alone a management consultant.
Third, rather than being cautious about the notion that technology-is-socially-neutral, there is an unexamined understanding that it is indeed socially neutral. Instead of viewing the conceptual edifice as problematical, he uses his empirical material to pattern variations on the construct. It is a form of abstractionism leading to essentialism, a common failing also among a number of critical management scholars.
The fourth problem is that the author’s view of trade union engagement with lean is quite limited. It is simply not the case that radical engagés oppose lean in a dismissive, ‘old’ Fordist way. In fact, a significant literature based upon the studies conducted by the Canadian Auto Workers in the 1990s and the Auto Workers’ Research Network (Canada, Brazil, Italy, Poland and the UK) highlighted the extent to which radical trade union critical engagement leads to better outcomes than those delivered by unions in so-called partnership agreements. Class and social autonomy are vital here, and ignoring class and social differences demoralises people seeking to improve the condition of their working and non-working lives.