Lean production, nyliberalism och ny kapitalism

Abstract

This article focuses on late modern discursive clashes and contradictions in everyday situations at Flextronics, mainly from the workplace in Karlskrona in southern Sweden. Flextronics is supplier of electronic components to companies like Ericsson and Siemens. This is a market crisscrossed by discourses anchored in two different types of capitalist production systems, which Richard Sennett has described as social capitalism and flexible capitalism (with lean production and customer orientation as guiding principles), the latter beginning to take shape in parallel with the emergence of neoliberal politics in the 1980s. How do individual subjects position themselves in relation to these competing discourses? How is this contradiction articulated and negotiated in the workers´ descriptions about work and their life situation? The result of this study shows that workers feel that they are being squeezed between incompatible standpoints. They express an understanding of the late capitalist companies need for flexibility and just-in-time-production, while at the same time not accepting the life in the margin that short contracts in line with lean production compels them to. They are forced to live a life in what they perceive as irregular and abnormal, because society in general is based on the fact that people have secured full-time employment. This applies for example to be able to get a loan in a bank. Therefore they tend to assent to a system that simultaneously relegates them to exclusion.