Creating the illusion of employee empowerment: lean production in the international automobile industry

A range of studies have pointed out the gap between management rhetoric and reality about employee empowerment in lean automobile plants. However, how managers in lean plants manage to carry off this illusion has received less attention in the literature. In this paper we adopt a critical approach to analyse some of the major studies in the lean automobile literature and identify a range of factors employed by lean managers which effectively explain how employee empowerment is silenced, despite corporate rhetoric to the contrary. We use the concept of heterogeneous engineering and associated post-structural ideas to demonstrate how the illusion is perpetrated in practice, paying attention to an actual case study in a lean automobile plant.