Are New Technologies Empowering Workers? Digital Lean Production and the Reorganization of Work in Manufacturing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Lean production is the dominant productive system in manufacturing, recent debates over digitalization have given rise to predictions of a new wave of work reorganization with potential benefits for workers. To what extent are Lean production and digitalization making headway in corporations and workplaces, and are they doing so in tandem? The present article argues that contradictions between distinct organizational levels follow the deployment of ‘Digital Lean’ practices. At the corporate level, these principles have spread within firms and managerial beliefs, yet their integration within workplaces has been far from unilateral. An analysis of the aluminum and rubber manufacturing sectors identifies two models of work organization, Empowered Digital Lean and Taylorized Digital Lean systems. The study shows that differences between the two regimes result from differing product markets, production characteristics and levels of workers’ power, while highlighting potential points of resistance for labor.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".