ABSTRACT
This is an ethnography of a failure – the story of an organizational reform using a management model from the automotive industry – a reform that couldn’t help but fail in preschools. It was a failure in recognizing that the context in which the Lean management model landed was so fundamentally different from the context in which it was first introduced that it could not possibly be useful. This book is about the non-translatability of management models and the model form. And it is a story of what the Lean management model did accomplish in Swedish public preschools – something that occurred even as the model was failing. The book draws from Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s work on ‘fast policy’ and ‘model power’. My thesis is that the ‘model power’ of fast-policy management models, easily transported into new domains, makes them both easy and difficult to fit into the practical realities of these new domains. It is the tension between the easy to use and the difficult to use in management models that is explored. I ask four questions in this book: What type of dispositions does the Lean management model entail? How are the frictions played out between what the model can accomplish and what the preschool world needs? How do preschool teachers enact the notion of efficiency inherent in the model? And what societal implications does it have? In answering these questions, I develop an ethnographic account of Swedish public preschools and the preschool teachers’ efforts and struggles to make sense of and use the Lean management model to improve their work organization, and I do it while exploring the frictions these efforts engendered. Lean ended up operating as a model that was bolted on to all the preschool activities the staff members were already required to handle. Theoretically, I understand Lean and other types of policies guiding and organizing preschool activities as actors or actants and follow the work of Cris Shore and Sue Wright, who describe policies as having agency in the way they shift action, perform tasks, and endow certain knowledge and competences. I focus on what Lean as a management model does in the world, and specifically in preschools.
