This book explores how Lean – a global management doctrine – operates and is adopted in the real, corporeal, collective, and affective environments of health and social care services.

During Lean implementation processes, knowledges, affects, skills, and materialities come together in manifold, complex ways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and observation, and with empirical and theoretical rigour, the book provides an answer to the question of what happens to care work when processes become ‘Leaned’. As in many other fields, the predominantly female health and...