ABSTRACT
For more than a decade, work organization and especially teamwork have been hotly debated topics in the discussion about reorganization of production. At least in theory, most firms declare that they are moving beyond ‘Taylorism’ and that teamwork or group work improves the work situation especially in production. The far reaching restructuring of production work which took place during the 1990s, especially in the car industry, has meant that this industry is a relevant field for investigating problems of intensity and sustainability. Here new approaches to production work have been most ambitious. The rush towards new forms of work organization was often initiated under the label of lean production coined by the IMVP (International Motor Vehicle Project) at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Womack et al. 1990).
