Dan Coffey

Automation, motivation and lean production reconsidered

Purpose – Aims to present an alternative way of interpreting unfolding events as these pertain to the organisation of manufacturing practices in the assembly plants of the leading Japanese car assembler, Toyota.Design/methodology/approach – This is an analysis of assembly plant automation in the automotive industry.Findings – Fifteen years ago, it was argued that the lean car assembly plants of the future would be comprehensively automated, but that in the meantime organization rather than automation was the watch‐word for efficient plants. Today it is possible to invert this prognosis as it applies to the leading “lean” car assembler, Toyota. Automation certainly played a much larger role in accounting for high labour productivity in the late 1980s than has generally been understood; but in the subsequent years priority has been given to managing the manual component in car assembly, and aggressive automation as a preferred strategy has been put on ice.Originality/value – The findings raise new questions...

The Myth of Japanese Efficiency

Combining case studies with accessible but rigorous production models and historical background, this provocative book challenges accepted views on Japanese production methods in the world car industry. The book argues that the ‘lean and flexible’ production model popularly associated with Toyota MC is a myth, but one which sheds light on cultural responses to the attendant stresses of globalization. To illustrate this, Dan Coffey provides individual studies of process flexibility, labour productivity and the re-organization of work in the global car industry.

The Low Pay Commission in context

The Low Pay Commission was established in July 1997, and produced its ‘First Report’ in June 1998. It formed part of a series of initiatives marking a new Labour Government in the UK, which included inter alia the White Paper ‘Fairness at Work’, setting out new state positions on union recognition and wide-ranging changes to the benefits system. This article provides an initial comment on this institution, focusing on context, process, and remit, and on relevance to broader debates on the meaning of ‘fair’ wages and economic ‘efficiency’. The first section explores the political economic context. The second compares and contrasts the Commissions deliberations and recommendations. Finally, an assessment is made of these recommendations and the implications for trade unions.

Crisis or Recovery in Japan

This innovative and multidisciplinary book explores Japan’s economic crisis and recovery. Specifically, it analyses the role of corporations, the state, macroeconomic and industrial policy, and the changing status of Japan as an economic role model. The contributors list comprises an international panel of economists, political scientists and international relations specialists. From vantage points across Japan, North America and Europe, they bring together a collection of original studies considering Japan’s economic malaise and the potential for sustained recovery.

Low carbon mobility versus private car ownership: Towards a new business vision for the automotive world?

This article considers a generalized leasing model for car use as a means of better reconciling profit seeking by car makers with environmental improvements, while supporting income generation and employment in the car business sector. It locates its contribution against the ‘extended producer responsibility’ framework, proposed by some as a basis for a corporate response to environmental and resource concerns. We show that within limits a reorganization of the business model informing the volume car market offers one part of a solution to problems of economic growth and climate change. The article progresses to consider obstacles to change and options for government policy.

Multiple Facilities, Strategic Splitting and Vertical Structures: Stability, Growth and Distribution Reconsidered

This paper explores comparative cost structures when large firms split operations between separate production facilities in a way that puts pressure on wage rates and worker effort levels: one example of a divide and rule strategy. It differentiates horizontal structures of this kind based on requirements for stability in a context of growing aggregate production vis-a-vis wages and effort. The analysis is formulated within a more general perspective that also considers vertical structures. It considers the implications for contemporary policy debates on desirable industrial forms, and concludes with a discussion of factors that might limit the scope for policies intended to promote industrial stability and redistribution via existing production networks.

Old-Time Militancy and the Economic Realities: Towards a Reassessment of the Dockers' Experience

This article makes the case for a fundamental reassessment of an important stage in the history of industrial relations in the UK port transport sector vis-a-vis the regulation of employment and the controversial demise of the National Dock Labour Scheme. It argues that the popular view that state regulation combined with trade union organisation and restrictive working practices in the 1970s and 1980s to undermine the competitiveness of the port transport sector lacks convincing empirical foundations. It notes some implications for wider debates around Britains variety of capitalism.

Shock, Awe and Continuity: Mrs Thatcher's Legacy for the Public Sector

This article makes the case for a nuanced and historically informed analysis of Mrs Thatchers legacy for the public sector, which distinguishes between shocks and continuities, and gives due weight to particular political economic features of the British state. We conclude with an assessment of the material and ideological legacy.

Lean Production: The Original Myth Reconsidered

This chapter commences with a reassessment of the data which originally emboldened leading figures in an MIT-headquartered car assembly plant productivity survey, conducted in the late 1980s, to declare that definitive evidence had been collated to show conclusive organisational advantages in production centred in Japan, which for successfully emulating firms abroad would dramatically lower the hours of assembly plant labour required to make cars at any level of factory automation. ‘Lean production’ — a Western made term — was invented and promoted in this connection, giving rise to an enormous subsequent literature, both prescriptive and critical. The practices of one car producer in particular, Toyota, were identified as the key to success by the apostles of lean production — the reference point for lean thinking. An alternative interpretive reading of the original survey data is first advanced, pointing to quite different conclusions which could have been drawn had the survey authors been more open to other possibilities, and which helps explain why the radical worldwide lift in production potentials predicted by lean thinkers has not transpired. We next consider the relevance of our interpretive reading for the understanding of labour process issues, noting a striking anomaly in the Japanese variety of industrial capitalism when compared with the West.

The End of Things: The Great Financial Crisis

We now come to the current crisis that threatens to undermine many of the assumptions and policy predispositions of what both critics and admirers often refer to as the ‘Anglo-American’ model of liberal capitalism, and casts a long shadow over the global health of capitalism more generally. But even internationally, and with regards to specific questions of market regulation, the smaller partner in this unequal pairing cannot be treated as coincident with the larger, and among the questions to be addressed in this chapter is the extent to which Britain has been rendered vulnerable to the increasing scale of the world crisis as a result of its own policy failings. After a short review of salient features of the crisis, with reference both to its impact on the UK economy and the drama of its unfolding, we go on to explore the extent to which British policy mindsets and the policies pursued underlie and explain a manifest lack of preparedness for the current situation. Against this, we consider attempts to reference the crisis in the United Kingdom as a distinctly ‘global’ or US phenomenon. We then pose some questions regarding pragmatic and intellectual responses to the crisis. But a principal concern at this point — a prelude to the close of this book — is with unresolved weaknesses in, and political dilemmas for, the British economy on the one hand, and state denial of the portents of crisis and avoidance of responsibilities on the other.