ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the evaluation of ‘joy at work’ among the preschool staff members through the Lean colours of green, yellow, and red. In the automotive industry, Lean sets targets for the number of automobiles that should be produced – targets that are made visual on a board, their status tracked by green, yellow, and red symbols. Green signifies that the target has been met, yellow is a warning that production is starting to fall behind, and red indicates that the automobile production is missing the target. In preschools, the same colours are used to measure the teachers’ joy at work. This chapter compares the use of colours in preschools to their use in the Lean management model, by focusing on the role of colour in organizational practice. By turning attention to the agency of colour, I want to shed light on its operations and power in Swedish public preschools, and in so doing, to investigate the agentive powers of colours. This means that I must attend to the multiplex political forces that colours both reveal and produce as they compose commanding elements of apparently mundane evaluative bureaucratic practices. Ethnographically, the chapter addresses the role of colours in children’s play and pedagogy and their role as a Lean monitoring tool. It is placed in a Lean staff meeting as the teachers evaluate their workweek through colours.
