ABSTRACT
This chapter examines plans and planning in preschools. It focuses on the hope produced by the Lean action plan of turning current states into desired states. The notion of a plan has a temporal aspect, promising something for the future. In this way, it is intimately connected to hope. Plans can control, oppress, change, or improve, but inherent in plans are hopes for a better future, even if it is in the name of oppression. Here I pay attention to what plans do as they make promises about the future. The main focus is on the affective and performative role played by plans in the Lean model and to the way it relates to preschools. I treat hopes and plans as ethnographic categories for critical analysis. I am interested in the agentive powers of hope in creating imagined futures when Lean plans are made. It is the performative role of plans and their ability to provoke affective responses that is investigated here in relation to Lean and the organization of preschools. The main focus is what plans and hopes do in preschools. Ethnographically, the chapter explores preschool planning and action in relation to Lean action plans and preschool teachers’ attempts to turn Lean plans into action.
