Just-in-Time, `Regimes' and Reductionism

This article gives critical consideration of a number of points about just-in-time (JIT) production organisation raised by Sewell and Wilkinson in their recent paper in Sociology (May 1992). Their analysis of JIT as a system, and of its `embedding' in organisations, is shown to be reductionist and the roots of certain aspects of this weakness are related to deficiencies in fashionable neo-Foucauldian notions of production `régimes'. In its final section the article suggests that the analytical basis of a better approach to JIT already exists in socio-technical theory.