ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with manufacturing flexibility, and focuses on producing quality and leaning the production. It discusses how the notion of 'flexibility' has gained its central role in the strategic management discourses and the different modes in which flexibility appears in those discourses. The chapter focuses on how managerial discourses of quality and lean manufacturing have brought about a new set of managerial tool boxes to synchronize the factory floor with the market. Flexible consumption constitutes its strategic intention while flexible machines and flexible labour provide the resources and competence or capacity to realize flexible manufacturing. Flexible specialization takes the notion of flexibility beyond the organizational boundaries of the flexible manufacturing system to the level of industrial regulation and industrial development. The concept of flexible accumulation takes the notion of flexibility a further step more into the global dynamics of capital and labour. The discursive significance of quality stems from its capacity to reformulate managerial thought, structures, relations, processes, and practices.
