ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on affective encounters in the ordinary work performances of welfare service workers. It leans on Deleuzian/Spinozist understanding of life itself and works accordingly as a process of affecting and being affected by other bodies. Encountering bodies either combine and form a more powerful acting unit or disintegrate and lose their powers to act and think. In the chapter, bodies refer not only to individual bodies but also to immaterial bodies such as technologies and ideas, including such Lean ideas as ‘eliminating waste’ and ‘continuous improvement’. The underlying questions throughout are: when, if at all, does encountering Lean create compositions, decompositions, or forms in-between? Does Lean ideas help in paving the way for wise and ethical work performances? Or does Lean work in the opposite direction, and if so, under what circumstances? The findings suggest that there are several possible mismatches between Lean and welfare service work. It seems that Lean overestimates care workers’ capacities to use their affective energy in a work that is already based on affect and caring. Lean promoters, for their part, underestimate and underfinance the time necessary to implement a proper new scheme of work. The outcome of encounters with Lean can make workers overburdened and tired.
