ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates flows in preschools and management models. It focuses on Lean’s premise of efficient flows, the elimination of waste in the Lean management model, and how flow and waste are played out in preschools. The notion of efficient flows highlights what Hartmut Rosa calls ‘the escalatory logic of modernity’, in that modernity requires systematic growth, innovation, and acceleration, making room for ‘fast policy’, to use Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s term. The promise that smooth flows and efficiency would eliminate waste provides Lean with ‘model power’. I argue that Lean is what William Bogard calls a ‘socially produced smoothing machine’, set to smooth flows by eradicating waste in production processes. The main focus is the dynamic and performative role played by waste in making efficient flows in the Lean smoothing machine and how it relates to preschools. Ethnographically, the chapter explains how the movement of children is organized, as they move from the yard into the preschool. The chapter takes the reader to a Lean coach-training course, through which I learnt about the importance of flow and efficiency from Lean’s point of view, and it is set in a Lean meeting where preschool staff members are attempting to make the preschool yard flow smoothly.
