Lean production of intensive cities: Using the power of Italo Calvino's imagination to grasp organizational change

Abstract

This article analyses the introduction of Lean Production to ‘the Procurement Office’ (the Procurement Office is made anonymous due to promises of confidentiality in the research project ‘Lean without stress’), a work place marked by continuous organizational changes, unfavourable image and high turnover. This is analysed in terms of Italo Calvino's Invisible cities. It is argued that Calvino's themes and prose help us understand change as a multiplicity of temporal intensities producing ambivalence and affect. We describe this use of literary abstractions as a ‘hyperbolic social epistemology’. Through the depiction of four intensifications of Lean Production, the metaphors of Calvino's cities show how reality and illusion; hope and poverty; dreams and death and utopia and dystopia are intricately mingled and produce temporary and equally ambivalent affects of alienation, hypocrisy, self-governance, job-satisfaction, antagonisms and empowerment.

Keywords:

• organizational change
• Lean Production
• organizational imagination
• hyperbolic social epistemology

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Thomas Basbøll, Sverre Spoelstra, the editors and anonymous referees for their helpful comments. And thanks to the Procurement Office for allowing us to take part in their everyday lives and sharing their thoughts, frustrations and enthusiasms.

Notes

1. Thanks to Stäheli for suggesting this notion at his presentation of Gabriel Tarde's epistemology, Copenhagen Business School, April 2009. It has not yet been introduced in the form of a written text. It should be noted that Stäheli did not suggest the hyperbolic social epistemology as a general method of inquiry and the implication of doing so is solely our responsibility, not his. Also, we immediately note that we merely draw upon Stäheli's analysis of Tarde's rhetorical and epistemological techniques, not Tarde's epistemology as such. In this regard, we have no ambitions of integrating Tarde's theory of ‘the social’ in the present framework but rather draw our inspiration from his aesthetic form, as analysed by Stäheli.