IS LEAN PRODUCTION THE SOLUTION

The Japanese system of lean production is the most efficient way for m anufacturing cars argue Womack et al. in their MIT study The Machine t hat Changed the World (1990). They strongly recommend Western companie s to learn and adapt to it, if they want to survive in the 1990s. This paper shows that lean production per se is not sufficient to explain the Japanese superiority unless favourable macroeconomic and microecon omic conditions prevail (precisely as for mass production). It also po ints to some methodological and analytical deficits in the MIT study.