Merchandising has seen tremendous changes over the last fifty years. “Mom and pop grocery stores” have given way to large retail and then wholesale distributors – the “big box” stores – and this has been followed by the development of on-line giants like Amazon.com that control almost 40 percent of online purchases (Mitchell and Lavecchia 2016). This was accompanied by the relatively high-priced Seven-Eleven convenience stores, and then by low-priced T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, Family Dollar, and Dollar General stores that buy up overstocks, out of season, or seconds items to sell at lower prices. Even the once dominant Sears Corporation has had difficulty negotiating these changes.

To paraphrase Brian Maskell, a prominent lean accounting pioneer, lean accounting is aligning financial management with the economics of lean. Traditional cost accounting or standard cost accounting has not changed its methodology in over 100 years, and often reports and other information generated are only superficially understood and hard to apply to real-world decision making even in non-lean companies. Then, as a company transitions to lean management and production, the accounting information becomes even less viable and much of it is useless. When accounting transitions to lean accounting, it partners with other functions including manufacturing. Through these partnerships, accounting gains a greater understanding of the company’s product and customer strategies. As a result, accounting informational output can be redesigned and enhanced to be more applicable, timelier, much easier to understand, and to better support the company’s lean transition needs. Decision makers at all levels will have more valuable information that can be utilized deeply in analysis and decision making. New output might include higher-value reports, box scores, visual displays in production, trend charts, key performance indicators, etc. In turn, accounting becomes a more collaborative and valuable partner and consultant in a company’s lean transition.

The objective of this chapter is to introduce the University of Kentucky IR4TD Lean Systems Program (LSP) and the concept of “True Lean,” as well as to discuss what we have observed to be critical challenges (derailers) to the successful implementation of Toyota Production System-(TPS)-based principles within non-Toyota organizations. This learning stems from experience teaching, coaching, and facilitating lean implementation activities in a wide range of industries over the past twenty-five years. Participants in the LSP Lean Certification program have been sent by over 175 companies representing industries from healthcare, steel, glass, ceramics, textiles, automotive, railroads, aerospace, commercial aviation, fast food restaurants, and food processing manufacturers as well as government, education, and NGOs. This chapter shares data collected from our staff and clients in an effort to help understand the current condition of lean in industry today and the major challenges confronting successful lean implementations.

The social sciences perspective on lean production is much less unified than the previous two areas of management and industrial engineering. Some studies of the impact of lean production on the workforce cover positive aspects such as teamwork, job rotation, job enrichment, and job satisfaction. Other studies examine the negative aspects such as work intensification, long and unannounced overtime, and the extensive use of temporary workers. Yet another group studies the diffusion of lean production, and there are alternative models like socio-technical theory and diversified quality production. As a result, this chapter focuses on six approaches to lean: (1) sociological studies of lean production; (2) socio-technical theory as a social psychological approach to lean and teamwork; (3) the diffusion of lean production; (4) critical social science and flexible accumulation; (5) the productive models approach; and (6) diversified quality production. The social sciences are more divided about the benefits and costs of lean production, so we start with the three positive views and follow with the three critical approaches.

This chapter discusses the German experience with supervisory codetermination, in which shareholder and employee representatives share governance of large corporations. After discussing the basic features of the system, we examine how it has been viewed by American corporate law scholars as an anomaly that could only arise through legislative fiat. In fact, the German system was born of consensual agreement at a time when labor and capital had roughly equal bargaining power, and only later became enshrined in law. We then discuss recent studies that evaluate how well codetermination serves the needs of various corporate constituents, including employees, creditors, and shareholders, and the role it played in Germany's relatively rapid recovery from the global financial crisis. In the end, the success of the German system serves as an empirical rejoinder to the hypothetical arguments used by law and economics scholars to justify the exclusive shareholder franchise, as well as a sort of proof of concept of the shared governance model.

Lean thinking was an unfamiliar concept in the legal industry until 2005. Seeing changes coming in the market, a large United States-based law firm (800 plus lawyers) took the unusual step of exploring process improvement. Within two years it was using a hybrid of lean thinking and Six Sigma® on client projects (D’Amico and Johnson 2015). The 2008 recession increased client interest in lowering the cost of legal services. Other legal services providers began exploring lean thinking. It seemed as if lean thinking might face a growth surge in the legal industry.

Given just a month to compile this chapter and my role as a key actor in this story, what follows is necessarily a personal reflection on the lean journey in the UK. Many others will have their own stories to tell. Hopefully this narrative will be of value to future researchers drawing up a more comprehensive account.

The Cambridge International Handbook of Lean Production provides an overall argument that lean systems are the dominant division of labor in the world, which are spreading in diverse ways to the service industries and around the world. Whether you think lean is great or not, it is the overwhelming influence on the world-wide division of labor. Further, this Handbook examines the many sides of the lean production debate that rarely interact. One side sees efficiency and quality as paramount, and the other side sees the protection of workers as key. Consequently, this Handbook focuses on three major parts:The result is an international Handbook that is a comprehensive interdisciplinary examination of the future of the world of work and management in our global economy.

This chapter critically examines the claim that shareholders have a homogeneous interest in wealth maximization. This claim, which is central to several arguments for the exclusive shareholder franchise, is not accurate. Shareholder preferences diverge along a number of dimensions, including those in or out of a control group; those with differential voting power; those involved in vote buying or voting trusts; hedged shareholders; management, employee, and pension fund shareholders; sovereign wealth funds; and corporate social responsibility investors. Even shareholders with shared goals of wealth maximization may have differing timelines, risk tolerances, and ways of defining “wealth.” Thus, actual shareholders have a range of preferences far too great to support many of the arguments that rely on their shared agreement.