The Toyota Production System (TPS), most often known as ‘lean production’, has been a controversial concept. Although Toyota itself introduces the TPS as an interrelated system where optimum efficiency is achieved through the practices of Just-In-Time (JIT) and jidoka (the defect-preventing system) with ‘full utilisation of worker capacity’, there remains no consensual checklist of what makes a particular production system ‘lean’. As New (2007) argues, this makes discussion about the implementation of the TPS highly problematic.When is ‘lean production’ really ‘lean’? If a list of characteristics is taken to be constitutive of ‘lean production’, yet in a particular case one or more of these is taken to be missing, is the resulting production configuration ‘really’ an instance of ‘lean production’? The first object of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework to make some sense of this.
A dominant point of view associates ‘lean production’ with negative effects on workers, but Toyota itself, in an interesting period of experimentation in the 1990s in certain plants, adjusted its production system to emphasise Quality of Work Life (QWL). Although apparently contradictory, this was not as radical a change as may be imagined, since certain ‘forgotten’ TPS production concepts (Hampson 1999) emphasize the importance of treating human resources with care – although the extent to which such prescriptions are followed varies with different societal and market conditions. The resulting version of the TPS some have labeled ‘post-lean’. Taking this up, some scholars even go as far as to argue for a kind of ‘convergence’ based on the Volvoist ‘reflective’ production model.
The second objective of the paper is to address such questions in the context of an empirical investigation of the characteristics of the TPS implemented at Toyota Motor Thailand (TMT), the third largest production base of Toyota in Asia. There are few studies of the TPS in Asia, and none that we know of in Thailand (although there are some studies of ‘Japanese management practices’).
The paper aims to locate the TPS at TMT on a conceptual framework we devised for the purpose, between two ‘ideal types’ of production systems – ‘lean’ and ‘reflective’ production. Based on a wide range of interviews and plant visits, this paper argues that the form of TPS at TMT falls in between ‘lean’ and ‘post-lean’ versions. Rejecting questionable convergence models, a related stream of literature insists that the form taken by the TPS in any particular national institutional environment reflects that environment’s ‘societal effects’, along with ‘system’ and ‘dominance’ effects. In some respects the institutional environment in Thailand appears conducive to harsh, ‘lean’ versions of the TPS. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, some of the above mentioned ‘post lean’ characteristics are identifiable at TMT.
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