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Kaizen, Ethics, and Care of the Operations: Management After Empowerment

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  • Alexander Styhre

Abstract

The notion of empowerment has been increasingly used within management discourses during the 1990s. Empowerment is depicted by its proponents as the common denominator for recent managerial techniques and activities that acknowledge the individual employee as an intelligent, accountable, creative being, and therefore a productive resource for the company. Rather than thinking of management techniques as being, or not being, used to empower employees, this paper suggests that the notion of ethics, and more specifically what Foucault calls technologies of the self, provides possibilities for analysing how employees constitute themselves as ethical, productive, and legitimate members of society through the use of management techniques. This paper presents a study of how the management technique of kaizen, continuous improvements, is used in three Swedish companies. Thinking of work as ethically embedded rather than determined by the degree of distribution of the empowering resources in organizations paves the way for opportunities to conduct more sensitive analyses of how managerial techniques operate in practice.

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  • Alexander Styhre, 2001. "Kaizen, Ethics, and Care of the Operations: Management After Empowerment," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(6), pages 795-810, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jomstd:v:38:y:2001:i:6:p:795-810
    DOI: 10.1111/1467-6486.00259
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    Cited by:

    1. Johansen, Thomas Riise, 2008. "‘Blaming oneself’: Examining the dual accountability role of employees," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 544-571.
    2. Stavros Georgiades & Walter R. Nord & Georgio Georgiades, 2013. "Exploring Managers¡¯ Feelings about Employee Involvement in Change," Business and Management Research, Business and Management Research, Sciedu Press, vol. 2(4), pages 71-82, December.
    3. Lukas Goretzki, 2013. "Management accounting and the construction of the legitimate manager," Metrika: International Journal for Theoretical and Applied Statistics, Springer, vol. 23(4), pages 319-344, February.
    4. Rodrigo Lozano & Masachika Suzuki & Angela Carpenter & Olga Tyunina, 2017. "An Analysis of the Contribution of Japanese Business Terms to Corporate Sustainability: Learnings from the “Looking-Glass” of the East," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-17, February.
    5. Filippini, Roberto & Güttel, Wolfgang H. & Nosella, Anna, 2012. "Ambidexterity and the evolution of knowledge management initiatives," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 65(3), pages 317-324.
    6. Välikangas, Anita & Seeck, Hannele, 2011. "Exploring the Foucauldian interpretation of power and subject in organizations," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 49807, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    7. Thanh-Lam Nguyen, 2019. "STEAM-ME: A Novel Model for Successful Kaizen Implementation and Sustainable Performance of SMEs in Vietnam," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2019, pages 1-23, February.
    8. Carl Rhodes & Geraint Harvey, 2012. "Agonism and the Possibilities of Ethics for HRM," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 111(1), pages 49-59, November.

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