Lean on me!

The public sector in Sweden has since the 1980´s looked for inspiration from businesses and corporations in the organization of their work. This due to the emergence of a management trend known as new public management. One effect has been a spread of the concept of lean in multiple public sector organizations all over the country. Lean is a concept and method used to achieve efficiency and quality improvement and was developed in the automotive industry of Toyota. A key line in the concept of lean is to create value for the customer and reduce waste activities. The purpose of this study was to examine and analyse how the concept is used in the social services with a focus on how the employees perceive it. In order to fulfil this purpose, I have conducted five semi-structured interviews with social workers at a department within the social services in Sweden. The findings in this study suggests that the concept of lean has been presented by the governing as a natural development that will generate quality improvements within the organization. It was shown that the concept had difficulties fitting into the studied organization and that the employees resisted it since they saw that it was not compatible with the work they conducted. The concept was therefore unable to fulfil its purpose of making its employees work-methods more efficient. To some extent the employees has been forced to adjust themselves to the concept by acting lean, but it has yet not succeeded in making them think and feel lean. It has also been shown that lean can be seen as trend which legitimizes and gives an organization a certain status regardless of its results. Yet another conclusion made is that the social workers were able to adjust the concept by taking distance from it, which made lean more useful to them