https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
But somehow, management never accepts this reality. Even the Japanese auto industry is regressing into Taylorism.
I've worked the line twice - first time as a teen looking for any work, the second time as an undercover analyst hired to examine why Lean was failing at a plant, both doing the same type of job: electrical component assembly. I got physical injuries (minor) both times. The majority of the assembly line workers had repetitive stress injuries, including losing fine motor skills and wrist control due to use of impact wrenches and exposure to bad ergonomics. If a human delaminates, you can't glue them back.
Although rational (Taylorism, Management by Objectives, MBO, OKR, Milestones, management by goals ) vs. normative (Lean / Toyoda, human-centric, Agile, humanist, culture ) division of management styles/rhetoric has been proposed, they should perhaps be seen through the prism of Creative Destriction (not disruption, and surprisingly, CD comes from Marx).
In a vulgar approximation, imagine capital-backed entities served by the manager class, which are stressed by short deadlines and performance-tied bonuses and careers. They are constantly shifting basic approximations of solutions and perspectives, without challenging the system.
Give employees more autonomy, and output and managerial control suffer. Instill more rigid control, and risk losing the ability to innovate and "knowledge producing" (Drucker of MBO fame) talent such as programmers.
In an antagonistic system, whatever you come up with has its own roots of destruction on top of built-in conflict (Marx again). Hence the back-and-forth re-framing between "rational" (Taylorism) and normative "culture, baybe, Holocracy!" so fast that today it is a zombie that has both and neither.
You end up with projectification, corporate "culture" that demands the soul and meeting arbitrary "milestones" from employees, but the corporation itself can only guarantee arbitrary termination.
There is a great and influential analysis "Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse" by Barley and Kunda. I would suggest reading "Management fashion" by Abrahamson as well. Both can be found through G.scholar, including no-registration copies.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572
(I don't know about worker health problems, and I imagine that poor as Japan was at the time, any empiric data on it would be useless. But, anyway, I don't think the management structure is the correct place to fix that one problem.)
And I'll have to break into your Marxist narrative, but all that was once incredibly successful in a fully capitalist framework. It never became non-competitive, it was only replaced by order of top-down command structures.
The approach I outline can explain and predict why the two Ts rotate, including at Toyota (Toyota going Taylor, or rather normative - rational).
I prefer not to base my experience on what Deming or anyone else wrote, but how their writing relates to real-life practice (though of course as a critic of Taylorism as represented by MBO and other Performance Evaluation rational schools, he is a welcome breath of fresh air).
Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? I have only seen a shift towards projectification and cultural hegemony.
> Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system?
As a participant, never. As an independent, we are talking about the mentor of the movement that teached the Japanese management how to go from an industry that didn't produce anything good into the highly developed one that outcompeted everybody all ever the world.
So why the shift to Taylorism at Toyota, the heart of the Toyota system? Why the shift to projectification from life-long employment at Japan? How can one explain chronic injury if workers get to plan and improve the workflow (or are wasted humans not considered waste)?
And the Toyoda principles at the heart of Toyota predate Deming. (Ohno, Taiichi (March 1988), Just-In-Time For Today and Tomorrow, Productivity Press, ISBN 978-0-915299-20-1 )
The list of paradoxes can continue indefinitely, or one can elect to look for the root cause.
well, for the performance pay, Deming is more subtle: its not that it doesn’t work, its that the performance must be something meaningfully under the employees control for performance pay based on it to work (otherwise it can’t influence anything), and it must be a holistic measure of company value (otherwise you get perverse incentives around microoptimizations), and your measure of performance must take into account the degree of uncontrolled variation in the process (otherwise you give false negative and positive signals due to random variation rather than real problems/improvements).