Hegemony meaning the influence or control over another group of people is what taylorism aimed to achieve. We lean production striving to accomplish this not only in labor but in lower management. By capitalizing on the concept of team work lean production has taken the control of labor and has been able to embed low level management into the labor force (Team Leaders). This is crucial because it diminishes the primary role of labor, cognitive input. Gramsci metaphor "war position" is referring to the elimination of autonomy in the work place. "Lean production is just as much an ideological assault as assault on the organization of work" (Lecture, p. 10). When this is said we think of Taylorism and how he emphasized the separation of labor and thinking. Lean production actually takes it in the opposite direction; its desire is to have labor think like management. "A worker's deep, often tacit knowledge of one specific task becomes linked to an understanding of how the overall system works, and how one's piece of it relates to other upstream and downstream tasks." (MacDuffie, P. 55-56).
Labor knowledge is what unions stride to protect for years but this isn't knowledge of labor but of the system. "Kaizen is the deliberate organization of work to encourage worker ideas to be surfaced, specified and legitimized as an input to making changes in the production process" (MacDuffie, P 56). We need to think of the difference in knowledge of labor and the knowledge of the system. The knowledge of labor is when the worker formulates an idea and than implements it to their own betterment of both the skill and product. The knowledge of the system is labor "is subjected to careful documentation and comparison with the current process before adoption and must be approved by engineers or managers; after a suggestion is adopted, the work is again standardized for all workers who perform it" (MacDuffie, P 56).
