ABSTRACT
The subject of this paper-workers’ opportunities to conceptualize under a system of lean production-is one of many issues addressed in our longitudinal case study of CAMI, a unionized joint venture automobile assembly plant in Canada.1 The project arose from concerns of the Canadian Automobile Workers (CAW) union over an emergent, rapidly spreading system of management and production about which the union had only second-hand knowledge and virtually no information on how this system recasts the labour process and relates to an independent union. The CAW research group on CAMI was interested in understanding not how Japanese production management (JPM) works in theory, but how it actually operates in a concrete setting. Research questions and methods were framed by union concerns, debates in the literature on JPM-particularly distinct views of how this system affects workers and unions-and our interest in examining the social relations of production on the shop floor.
