ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how humour and resistance come together as affective configurations in a Lean training. Drawing from ethnographic data collected in a one-year Lean training, the chapter traces humour as a troubling hinge that enables us to look at worker resistance anew. The chapter starts with the notion that Lean is introduced as a happy object that promises to make work ultimately more joyous. Lean as a happy object is circulated in the Lean training through varieties of exercises and games that ask for and evoke playfulness, enthusiasm, and humour. However, the findings suggest that Lean cannot be taken for granted as a happy object. By participating in games and creating playful, hopeful, and enthusiastic atmospheres, trainees were able to plug into or tune into the affective doings of Lean in ways that simultaneously also evoked critical views of Lean implementation. The chapter discovered that affective dimensions of resistance, including humour, are not an endpoint, not a ‘voice’, or a result, but a precursor of action: a potentiality for resistance.
