5 ms·

There may not be that much difference between Lean (Toyota) and Taylorism. Don't forget that Toyota (Toyoda) is not that far from Fordism - "you get whatever co

There may not be that much difference between Lean (Toyota) and Taylorism. Don't forget that Toyota (Toyoda) is not that far from Fordism - "you get whatever color you want as long as it is black". Employees get to tweak the process but the fundamental model stays the same. They don't get to change the assembly line, nor the parts, nor what is assembled. And Toyota guaranteed life-long employment when it was implemented. I've worked the line twice - first time as a teen looking for any work, the second time as an undercover analyst hired to examine why Lean was failing at a plant, both doing the same type of job: electrical component assembly. I got physical injuries (minor) both times. The majority of the assembly line workers had repetitive stress injuries, including losing fine motor skills and wrist control due to use of impact wrenches and exposure to bad ergonomics. If a human delaminates, you can't glue them back. Although rational (Taylorism, Management by Objectives, MBO, OKR, Milestones, management by goals ) vs. normative (Lean / Toyoda, human-centric, Agile, humanist, culture ) division of management styles/rhetoric has been proposed, they should perhaps be seen through the prism of Creative Destriction (not disruption, and surprisingly, CD comes from Marx). In a vulgar approximation, imagine capital-backed entities served by the manager class, which are stressed by short deadlines and performance-tied bonuses and careers. They are constantly shifting basic approximations of solutions and perspectives, without challenging the system. Give employees more autonomy, and output and managerial control suffer. Instill more rigid control, and risk losing the ability to innovate and "knowledge producing" (Drucker of MBO fame) talent such as programmers. In an antagonistic system, whatever you come up with has its own roots of destruction on top of built-in conflict (Marx again). Hence the back-and-forth re-framing between "rational" (Taylorism) and normative "culture, baybe, Holocracy!" so fast that today it is a zombie that has both and neither. You end up with projectification, corporate "culture" that demands the soul and meeting arbitrary "milestones" from employees, but the corporation itself can only guarantee arbitrary termination. There is a great and influential analysis "Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse" by Barley and Kunda. I would suggest reading "Management fashion" by Abrahamson as well. Both can be found through G.scholar, including no-registration copies. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572

marcosdumay 5y ago
Sorry, but if all you got from Toyotism was Lean, than you got somewhere already fully geared into Taylorism. There is much more to it, and yeah, even one of the tenets you will get from Deming is that short deadlines and performance-tied bonus and careers can't work. He also goes a great length about empowering employees to change things like part sourcing, but yeah, not the final product. (I don't know about worker health problems, and I imagine that poor as Japan was at the time, any empiric data on it would be useless. But, anyway, I don't think the management structure is the correct place to fix that one problem.) And I'll have to break into your Marxist narrative, but all that was once incredibly successful in a fully capitalist framework. It never became non-competitive, it was only replaced by order of top-down command structures.
- NotPavlovsDog 5y ago
  I would appreciate an expansion on the "break into". The approach I outline can explain and predict why the two Ts rotate, including at Toyota (Toyota going Taylor, or rather normative - rational). I prefer not to base my experience on what Deming or anyone else wrote, but how their writing relates to real-life practice (though of course as a critic of Taylorism as represented by MBO and other Performance Evaluation rational schools, he is a welcome breath of fresh air). Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? I have only seen a shift towards projectification and cultural hegemony.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    What breaks the narrative is that the system is clearly not antagonistic. Giving the correct kind of autonomy to the workers increases every single item that management should care about, at least in a capitalist system. And both logic and evidence point that way. > Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? As a participant, never. As an independent, we are talking about the mentor of the movement that teached the Japanese management how to go from an industry that didn't produce anything good into the highly developed one that outcompeted everybody all ever the world.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Sorry, but if all you got from Toyotism was Lean, than you got somewhere already fully geared into Taylorism. There is much more to it, and yeah, even one of the tenets you will get from Deming is that short deadlines and performance-tied bonus and careers can't work. He also goes a great length about empowering employees to change things like part sourcing, but yeah, not the final product. (I don't know about worker health problems, and I imagine that poor as Japan was at the time, any empiric data on it would be useless. But, anyway, I don't think the management structure is the correct place to fix that one problem.) And I'll have to break into your Marxist narrative, but all that was once incredibly successful in a fully capitalist framework. It never became non-competitive, it was only replaced by order of top-down command structures.

NotPavlovsDog 5y ago
I would appreciate an expansion on the "break into". The approach I outline can explain and predict why the two Ts rotate, including at Toyota (Toyota going Taylor, or rather normative - rational). I prefer not to base my experience on what Deming or anyone else wrote, but how their writing relates to real-life practice (though of course as a critic of Taylorism as represented by MBO and other Performance Evaluation rational schools, he is a welcome breath of fresh air). Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? I have only seen a shift towards projectification and cultural hegemony.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  What breaks the narrative is that the system is clearly not antagonistic. Giving the correct kind of autonomy to the workers increases every single item that management should care about, at least in a capitalist system. And both logic and evidence point that way. > Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? As a participant, never. As an independent, we are talking about the mentor of the movement that teached the Japanese management how to go from an industry that didn't produce anything good into the highly developed one that outcompeted everybody all ever the world.