Implementing different concepts of lean production: workers' experience of lean production in North American transplants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is there a 'logic' to industrial capitalism and the market forces of an increasingly global economy which encourages work practices and employee management strategies of individual organisations and across national borders to become more similar? This article responds to this question by considering the experience of workers in Japanese-Canadian and Japanese-American joint ventures and Japanese transplants in the North American automobile industry. The dissimilarities of the parent Japanese companies' lean production systems are highlighted before consideration is given the factors which initially encourage adoption by North American subsidiaries of Japanese automobile companies of Japanese employee management techniques and the experiences of workers in these transplants which result in North American workers seeking reassert more pluralist concepts and approaches to the employee-management relationship. By placing the development and implementation of the various Japanese versions of lean production into their cultural, technological, geographic, historical, and organisational contexts, this article suggests the variety which flourishes even when conformity is seemingly evident. Consideration of Japanese efforts to import their management techniques into North America suggests both the contexts in which organisations, workforces, labor markets, and political structures are receptive to new management techniques and the strength of cultural, political, and labour relations institutions and practices to modify and recreate. The convergence-divergence debate, as with most dichotomies, demands one winner; reality is, however, more complex and forces not one choice, but rather fosters the creation of more options.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".