ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the order of presentation and look at the corporations first and examines the disciplines. It looks at the political implications of lean production in terms of national and global politics, which is something associated with some of these models and not so much with others. Flexible accumulation directly contradicted Toyotism on teams, so it was like a failed true lean model. Labor process theory sees lean production as involving a large amount of worker exploitation though it may differ between companies, industries, and regions. Coupled with this exploitation is a view that the lean production version of the division of labor is coupled with an economic developmental process that is highly deterministic. The chapter deals with the convergence of three models of lean production—Toyotism, Nikeification and Waltonism—within a global context of the world capitalist system, and the speculative divergences of the additive model of possible future production.
