| Summary: | Lean production has made a comeback in businesses since the mid-2000s, triggering much debate about its impact on working practices. This paper seeks to highlight the manner in which “lean” conceives work. However, neither Ohno, who devised the method and its tools, nor Womack, Jones or Roos, its theoreticians, actually provide us with very much explicit theory. The key idea is to combat waste in the day-to-day operation of workshops. This may lead either to a reassessment of employees’ working conditions or to an obsession with reducing “unproductive” work time by forcing human beings to constantly adapt. This relative uncertainty is all the more important insofar as its implementation outside the automotive sector means that it may be applied in very different productive contexts.
|
|---|
