Vidal - Lean enough.pdf (1.19 MB)
Lean enough: Institutional logics of best practice and managerial satisficing in American manufacturing
Rational choice theory has been widely criticized for its unrealistic assumptions that individuals have perfect information and computer-like information processing capability, which are used to maximize utility. Sociological institutionalism and the behavioral theory of the firm have developed complementary alternatives. I combine the two into a single model of information processing. Institutional logics are central to top-down (schema-driven) processes that focus
attention and guide action. Satisficing—settling for good enough based on a given aspiration level—is critical to bottomup (feedback-driven) information processing. Here I show that two practices associated with the postfordist logic of the capitalist firm—lean production and worker empowerment—are deeply institutionalized as best practice in the
American manufacturing field. Based on interviews with 109 individuals in 31 firms, I demonstrate how moderate aspiration levels and conceptual schemas associated with formerly dominant fordist institutional logics both function to limit the adoption of best practice.
Funding
The research for this paper was made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, with further support provided by the UW Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE).
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic WorldVolume
3Pages
237802311773694 - 237802311773694Citation
VIDAL, M., 2017. Lean enough: Institutional logics of best practice and managerial satisficing in American manufacturing. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 3, n.p.Publisher
© The authors. Published by SAGE JournalsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-08-25Publication date
2017-11-06Copyright date
2017Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ISSN
2378-0231eISSN
2378-0231Publisher version
Language
- en
Administrator link
Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC