Abstract
Lean is a popular term that has been applied to many current business strategies and practices. Unfortunately, the term has come to mean many different things and has thus caused much confusion in both the academic and the practitioner world. In addition, lean has come to be seen as a positive influence in mostly every business situation. Therefore, the purposes of this chapter are to define clearly the term lean operations, provide a normative definition of business purposes, and then discuss in what manner and how well lean operations foster and support these business purposes.
Lean operations are shown to strongly support the normative business purpose of providing goods and services so that communities can thrive, but has a very mixed outcome when it comes to supporting the second normative business purpose of providing opportunities for meaningful work. The original principles that undergirded lean operations supported both business purposes, but the most recent common lean practices focus on achieving the first purpose through higher efficiencies and lower costs at the expense of providing meaningful work. The trending predominant use of the shareholder model for defining business purposes is suggested as the major contributor for this finding.
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Smith, T.M. (2017). Lean Operations and Business Purposes: Ethical Considerations. In: Vaduva, S., Fotea, I., Thomas, A. (eds) Business Ethics and Leadership from an Eastern European, Transdisciplinary Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45186-2_1
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