Gleaning lean culture : on Gleanologics

Landaw Mott, Natalie Joelle (2025) Gleaning lean culture : on Gleanologics. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

Since the term ‘lean’ was defined to disseminate the efficiency innovations of the Toyota Production System to an Anglophone audience, the slaughterhouse-sourced strategies of ‘lean thinking’ have spread across the world to ecocidal effect. Can practices of gleaning help identify lean culture’s acceleration and halt its harms? What I call gleanologics is a gleanerly methodology: a study of gleaning, and a way of gleaning, focussed on and through the word that can mean both ‘to gather and pick up ears of corn which have been left by the reapers’ and take figurative object, as in the sense of gleaning information. Gleanologics allow us to explore the relationships between gleaning, the gesture of leaning, and the genealogy of global lean management technologies, and in turn, lean culture, in the production of lean meat. This innovative methodology lends to the environmental humanities an ambitious transdisciplinary cross-periodic and cross-media view, examining cultural artefacts from the earliest gleaning narrative in the Book of Ruth to the most contemporary in the fiction of Jim Crace, key visual representations in the afterlife of Jean-François Millet through the film of Agnés Varda and food waste campaigns, the experimental writings of David Fleming and Peter Larkin, and pandemic cultures. Drawing on critical animal studies, critical management studies, disability studies, vegan theory, work on the commons, and research as practice, gleanologics are a militant vegan practice that unpacks the patterns of violence encoded in the lean management of everyday life and enact resistance to their rhetoric. Gleanologics show that glean contains lean. Just as the word ‘glean’ exceeds but involves the word ‘lean’, what it is to glean, always leaning, both includes and limits lean culture. This research methodologically reorients the environmental humanities towards lesser-discussed, pressing ecological threats and informs how gleaning and lean circulate in environmental activism.

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