J. Rinehart, J. Huxley and D. Robertson, Just Another Car Factory? Lean Production and its Discontents, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £11.95 paper,xi1+249 pp.

K. Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, London: Verso, 1997, £14.00 paper, viii+1342 pp.

T. A. Kochan, R. D. Landsbury and J. P. MacDuffie, J. P. After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, £14.95 paper, x+1349 pp.

Lean production: after the rhetoric

‘I have tried to be objective but I do not claim to be detached.’ C. Wright Mills (cited in Rinehart, Huxley and Robertson [209]).

Alfred Sloan is reputed to have said that the problem with workers was that every time management solved the labour question, the workers changed the question. Sloan's exasperation could be taken as a cypher for management's failure to deal with consequences of social and economic change in the automotive sector before the Second World War. The irony here of course is that so much of this dislocating experience was and still is management driven in the first place.