The human resource management implications of lean construction: critical perspectives and conceptual chasms

The Human Resource Management (HRM) implications of lean construction are considered from a critical perspective. Construction academics have strangely ignored an extensive literature that equates lean production to a HRM regime of control, exploitation and surveillance. The emphasis of lean thinking on eliminating waste and improving efficiency makes it easy to absorb into the best practice agenda because it conforms to the existing dominant way of thinking. In common with countless other improvement initiatives, the rhetoric of lean construction is heavy in the machine metaphor whilst exhorting others to be more efficient. In the absence of an explicit consideration of the HRM implications, lean construction is doomed to repeat the mistakes of previous instrumentalist improvement recipes. In the face of rapidly declining recruitment rates for built environment courses, this will do little to attract the intelligent and creative young people that the industry so badly needs. The tradition of Critical Management Studies (CMS) remains controversial within the construction management research community. Counter-criticisms offered by the proponents of lean construction are considered and the contribution to knowledge is defended. There is a tendency to suppress critical work on the basis that it lacks empirical evidence and is one-sided in its argument. If these criteria were applied to the existing lean construction literature, many of the seminal contributions would not have been published. Whilst it is valid and important to criticise the methodology of critical research, it must also be recognized that there are methodological limitations associated with all research paradigms. Different methodologies accentuate different aspects of reality.