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The purpose of this paper is to analyse through ethnographic fieldwork the social and cultural context and (unintended) consequences of introducing a management concept from the private sector (LEAN) into the public sector.

Ethnographic fieldwork combined with reading of reports and material.

The major findings are: first, Lean is seen in a cultural context, it is argued that the persuasiveness of Lean depends on building a metaphorical connection between organizational aims and individual experiences and bodily ideals; second, Lean purports to be a win-win game and road to eliminating “waste” through worker participation, empowerment and enthusiasm. The research points to the contrary. Lean was met with scepticism and was seen by the social workers as a waste of time.

As demonstrated in the paper, the vast majority of research published about Lean is hortatory in nature. It is recipe books trying to convince readers of the benefits of introducing Lean. This paper, on the contrary, attempts an open ethnographic exploration of the Lean process and its social and cultural ramifications.

There is a scarcity of research about cultural aspects of organization related to lean implementation. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of lean practices and organizational culture on the operational performance of small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises.

The study is based on a survey conducted and data collected from 215 manufacturing SMEs in India. The hypothesized relationships are then analyzed with structural equation modeling.

The results showed that the constructs of lean practices and organizational culture have significant and direct effects on the operational performance of Indian manufacturing SMEs. Further, this research shows the mediating effect of organizational culture on sustaining lean processes within small-medium manufacturing business setups.

Future research is required in a more diverse context to confirm the generalization of the results. Future research may be extended to investigate the effects of lean and organization cultural aspects on measures of financial, social and environmental performance.

The results obtained would help managers of manufacturing SMEs to better understand the linkage between lean and operational performance, considering the aspect of cultural change management in an organization. The outcome of this research provides useful indications of how organizations can work to sustain the philosophy of lean manufacturing within their workplace.

There is a lack of research at the critical intersection of organizational culture and sustainability of lean implementation. Culture is key to making changes required for lean implementation and in sustaining the drive toward lean production and management. This research is an attempt to fill that gap.

The questions addressed by this review are: first, what are the guiding principles underlying efforts to stimulate sustained cultural change; second, what are the mechanisms by which these principles operate; and, finally, what are the contextual factors that influence the likelihood of these principles being effective? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors conducted a literature review informed by rapid realist review methodology that examined how interventions interact with contexts and mechanisms to influence the sustainability of cultural change. Reference and expert panelists assisted in refining the research questions, systematically searching published and grey literature, and helping to identify interactions between interventions, mechanisms and contexts.

Six guiding principles were identified: align vision and action; make incremental changes within a comprehensive transformation strategy; foster distributed leadership; promote staff engagement; create collaborative relationships; and continuously assess and learn from change. These principles interact with contextual elements such as local power distributions, pre-existing values and beliefs and readiness to engage. Mechanisms influencing how these principles sustain cultural change include activation of a shared sense of urgency and fostering flexible levels of engagement.

The principles identified in this review, along with the contexts and mechanisms that influence their effectiveness, are useful domains for policy and practice leaders to explore when grappling with cultural change. These principles are sufficiently broad to allow local flexibilities in adoption and application.

This is the first study to adopt a realist approach for understanding how changes in organizational culture may be sustained. Through doing so, this review highlights the broad principles by which organizational action may be organized within enabling contextual settings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how cultural differentiation can affect the successful transplantation of lean management and production techniques from the parent country to subsidiary countries in the developing world. In particular, the focus will be on car manufacture in India and the role of hierarchy in Indian society, with reflection on how this seeps into workplace and power relations.

Lean production techniques have been hailed as revolutionising modern manufacturing, particularly in the automotive sector. In developed world countries, car manufacturers have made significant gains in efficiency and productivity as a result of their implementation. However, as many of these multinational companies (MNCs) have expanded production into rapidly-developing nations to take advantage of both their market and low-labour costs, the introduction of lean production practices have met some resistance. This is because certain underpinning concepts and values of the lean system, such as team work, delegation of authority and upward communication can be considered incompatible with aspects of local culture and employees’ attitude towards work and their superiors. The analysis presented is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with managers and workers from an India-based subsidiary of a MNC car manufacturer and engagement with the existing literature.

It concludes that paternal relationships, religious values and group orientation in Indian society have a significant impact on the dynamics of the workplace and result in a brand of power distance that is specific to this national context, raising questions about the suitability of universal implementation of lean production practices.

“Power distance” has become a catch-all term for cultures with an orientation towards hierarchy and status in society. However, this categorisation masks some of the factors belying the phenomenon and intricacies relating to how it plays out in the workplace. It is simplistic to postulate that high power distance cultures might be incompatible with management approaches that decentralise authority and increase worker participation. Rather than rely on overgeneralisations, the analysis provided has attempted to deconstruct the composition of power distance in the Indian context and document systematically how features of Indian culture conflict with the principles of lean production techniques, using a case study from an Indian subsidiary of a MNC. In particular, the study finds that religion, caste and paternalism create an India-specific power distance that manifests itself in worker behaviour and workplace relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to study management control mechanisms (social, behavioral, and output control mechanisms) and their complementary effects on firm performance in lean manufacturing firms.

The study uses second-order structural equation modeling to analyze survey data from 368 different lean manufacturing facilities.

The paper finds that the complementary effects of management control mechanisms in lean manufacturing firms outweigh their additive effects on firm performance.

Applying isolated lean management control mechanisms leads to inferior performance, as these management control mechanisms are complementary. Thus, to realize the full potential of lean manufacturing, this paper suggests that lean management control mechanisms should be implemented as an integrated control system.

Firms seeking to benefit from the implementation of lean manufacturing should understand the complementarity among the management control mechanisms, as the performance effects of lean management control mechanisms when applied together are greater than their isolated additive effects.

This paper is the first to provide empirical evidence of the superior firm performance effects of complementary lean management control mechanisms compared with their additive effects. This paper also expands the understanding of how to conceptualize lean management control mechanisms. Specifically, this is the first paper to distinguish between social cultural control and social visual control mechanisms as well as between non-financial and financial control mechanisms. This paper is also the first to use a second-order structural equation model to properly test and account for the complementary effects on firm performance that stem from multiple control mechanisms.

This article aims to introduce a guide to improving hospital bed setup by combining lean technical practices (LTPs), such as kaizen and value stream mapping (VSM) and lean social practices (LSPs), such as employee empowerment.

Action research approach was employed to analyze the process of reconfiguration of bed setup management in a Brazilian public hospital.

The study introduces three contributions: (1) presents the use of VSM focused specifically on bed setup, while the current literature presents studies mainly focused on patient flow management, (2) combines the use of LSPs and LTPs in the context of bed management, expanding current studies that are focused either on mathematical models or on social and human aspects of work, (3) introduces a practical guide based on six steps that combine LSPs and LSPs to improve bed setup management.

The research focused on the analysis of patient beds. Surgical beds, delivery, emergency care and intensive care unit (ICU) were not considered in this study. In addition, the process indicators analyzed after the implementation of the improvements did not contemplate the moment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this research focused on the implementation of the improvement in the context of only one Brazilian public hospital.

The combined use of LSPs and LTPs can generate considerable gains in bed setup efficiency and consequently increase the capacity of a hospital to admit new patients, without the ampliation of the physical space and workforce.

The improvement of bed setup has an important social character, whereas it can generate important social benefits such as the improvement of the admission service to patients, reducing the waiting time, reducing hospitalization costs and improving the hospital capacity without additional physical resources. All these results are crucial for populations, their countries and regions.

While the current literature on bed management is more focused on formal models or pure human and social perspectives, this article brings these two perspectives together in a single, holistic framework. As a result, this article points out that the complex bed management problem can be efficiently solved by combining LSPs and LTPs to present theoretical and practical contributions to the important social problem of hospital bed management.

This study investigates the relationship between lean manufacturing practices, management accounting and performance measurement (MAC & PM) practices, organizational strategy, structure, and culture, and facility performance. We extended past research by examining the relationships between lean manufacturing, MAC & PM practices and performance in a broader organizational context. Our study was performed using survey data provided by managers and executives at 368 facilities that had contacted the Shingo Institute for information or that had entered a Shingo Prize competition. Consistent with past research we found a significant positive association between lean manufacturing practices and lean MAC & PM practices. We found that greater employee empowerment, use of process performance measures, and use of lean accounting practices were driven primarily by lean strategy and secondarily by the extent of lean manufacturing practices. We also found that changes in organization structure to support lean are driven primarily by lean strategy and secondarily by lean manufacturing practices. Change toward lean culture, on the other hand, is driven by the extent of lean manufacturing practices. Further, we found that emphasizing process performance measures does not reduce emphasis on results performance measures and emphasizing results performance measures leads to improved financial performance. Process and results measures are being used in tandem and value stream costing has not replaced traditional accounting. The results of our study provide important insights for managers of companies engaged in lean transformation and for academics who teach or research lean accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the effects of the introduction of lean into healthcare workplaces, phenomena that have not been widely investigated.

The paper draws on discussions and findings from the literature. It seeks to bring the few geographically dispersed experiences and case studies together to draw some conclusions regarding lean’s negative effects.

Two recurring themes emerge. The first is there is little evidence of Lean’s impact on work and the people who perform it. The literature therefore suggests that we understand very little about how work conditions are changed and how Lean’s negative effects arise and may be managed in healthcare workplaces. A second observation is that Lean’s effects are ambiguous. For some Lean seems to intensify work, while for others it leads to improved job satisfaction and productivity. Given this variety, the paper suggests a research emphasis on Lean’s socio-cultural side and to derive more data on how work and its processes change, particularly in the context of healthcare team-working.

The paper concludes that without improved understanding of social contexts of Lean interventions its value for healthcare improvement may be limited. Future research should also include a focus on how the work is changed and whether high-performance work system practices may be used to offset Lean’s negative effects.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

Construction management is ameliorated by the lean construction concept in many direct and indirect ways to reduce waste of construction process and improve the value. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges of the implementation of lean construction in the Bangladeshi construction industry and to prioritize these factors that constitute these challenges.

A comprehensive literature review was used for shorting the global challenges of implementing lean construction. Subsequently, these challenges were incorporated into a structured questionnaire for survey. A total of 164 valid responses were collected from Bangladeshi construction practitioners involved in different types of construction organizations. The results were analyzed using the Relative Important Index (RII) and Mann–Whitney U test.

The findings revealed 41 challenges of lean construction implementation in the Bangladeshi construction industry. The highest ranking challenges are the lack of awareness about lean construction, lack of skills, training and lean techniques, unwillingness to change the existing culture, lack of management commitment, fragmented and cyclic nature of the construction project and unavailing communication between all project participants. The study also discusses some universally applicable solutions to overcome these challenges.

By the findings of this study, the Bangladeshi construction industry could get a new insight into the challenges of implementing lean construction. It could play a very important part in the body of knowledge, as it reveals the challenges of implementing lean construction for the first time with the socio-economic context of Bangladesh. Exploring the findings, the study could help the stakeholders, companies, academician, researchers and government to focus their effort and resources on the significantly appropriate issues. Furthermore, this study may beneficial to those developing countries especially in South Asia, who have shared the same socio-economic status with Bangladesh.