• Age: 18
• Grade: 12

This study of CAMI Automotive, a unionized joint venture between General Motors and Suzuki, is the most comprehensive ever undertaken of a lean production plant. James Rinehart, Christopher Huxley, and David Robertson address a topic that has inspired fierce debate in industrial relations, sociology, labor studies, and human resource management.

Heralded as a model of lean production when it opened in 1989, CAMI promised workers something different from traditional plants?a humane environment, empowerment, and cooperative labor-management relations. However, the enthusiasm workers felt during the orientation and early phases of production steadily declined, as did their involvement in participatory activities. Workers came to describe CAMI as "just another car factory." Union challenges and shopfloor resistance to key elements of the lean system grew, capped by a five-week strike in 1992. The authors attribute workers' disillusionment to lean production itself rather than to North American managers' inadequate implementation.

James Rinehart's profile page

Christopher Huxley's profile page

David Robertson's profile page

James Rinehart is Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of The Tyranny of Work: Alienation and the Labour Process. Christopher Huxley is Professor of Sociology and Comparative Development Studies at Trent University. David Robertson is Director of Work Reorganization and Training for the Canadian Auto Workers.

For purposes of teaching comparative industrial relations of teams in organization theory, this is a useful primer.

New Technology, Work, and Employment

The systematic and longitudinal surveying of employee attitudes... is a welcome feature of this book.

Industrial Relations Journal

This text provides a solid introduction to lean production as practiced in manufacturing today, and would be an excellent supplement to upper-division undergraduate as well as graduate courses focused on the labor process, labor-management relations, and/or studies of the manufacturing industries.

Contemporary Sociology

Just Another Car Factory? is, without a doubt, one of the most important publications to appear in the literature on Japanese work organization. It is a study of working conditions at CAMI, a joint GM/Suzuki venture located in Ingersoll, Canada, and organized according to Suzuki's version of Japanese or 'lean' production.... The book unequivocally demonstrates that work, working conditions, and work life in this plant do not correspond, in any way, to the idealized picture painted by advocates of the Japanese system.

Choice

This excellent work presents not only high-quality research linked to an overall research question, but also surprisingly rich data. Findings are displayed comprehensively, concisely, and with either avoidance or skillful explication of typical 'lean production' jargon.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review