Documents Vidal, Matt 3 results

"Business process reengineering and lean are increasingly used to restructure public sector work. This article presents a case study of reengineering in a California welfare agency. It finds extensive work intensification and reduced autonomy for the workforce, and deteriorating service for the clientele. Rather than attribute these outcomes as inherent to the business process reengineering model, this article emphasizes how cost cutting and quantitative efficiency were prioritized over worker empowerment and service quality because the organization is a government agency facing severe budgetary pressures under neoliberalism, and the clientele consists of indigent families and individuals who have no choice of an alternative provider."

"Advocates of lean production argue that a work system is truly lean only if a given bundle of practices, including worker empowerment, is implemented in the proper configuration. In contrast, my interviews and observations in six US manufacturing plants demonstrate that substantive empowerment is not a necessary condition for achieving a lean manufacturing system that yields considerable performance improvement. While many configurations I observe appear to be ‘lean enough' for satisficing managers, one commonality among the cases observed here is that worker empowerment is limited in depth and breadth. Employee involvement may be limited in depth because substantive empowerment requires a change in organizational routine and authority structure not necessary to achieve the largely technical goals of management. Even when an employer embarks on major technical and social change, pushing beyond lean enough toward world-class organization, substantive empowerment is limited in extent due to the demands of standardization and managerial prerogative, as well as resistance and reticence among workers."