always already
The original kanji characters for this word are 改善.
In Japanese this is pronounced 'Kaizen'.
改 ('Kai') means 'change' and
善 ('zen') means 'good'.
-Wikipedia
Kaizen is an approach to manufacturing and corporate organization developed by the Japanese after WWII, but which has now been adopted by companies worldwide. The word comes from "kai" and "zen," meaning, roughly, "school" and "wisdom" or, depending on your source, "change" and "good," respectively. Kaizen is often translated as "always improving" or "getting better through change." Basically, kaizen refers to practices whereby all aspects of an organizational system are continuously being tweaked or reorganized to maintain or improve performance. It includes a number of strategies, such as just-in-time production, and goals such as efficiency are held at a premium.
Nevertheless, there are nuances at work here. All members of the organization are encouraged to look for ways to improve. Rather than making big, sweeping changes, small changes are made on a regular basis. This is different from most Western approaches, which tend to emphasize stability until an actual problem is perceived, in which case change is sought. Kaizen instead continually incorporates change—it's a conscious effort to introduce continuous dynamism into the system.
Further, such change is not limited to the immediate work environment. Kaizen is extended to many aspects of an employee's life—business attitude, home life, social activities, almost everything. Furthermore, just as all aspects of work and production are subject to change and improvement, so also for the life of the employee. This is not just a case of improving oneself for the company; rather, it includes as a basic consideration that employees must be happy and satisfied in their work. The impetus behind this people-centric approach is that employees who are fulfilled in their work are better at what they do, so increasing such satisfaction also contributes to the overall goals of the company.
There is a connection here to music as we have been talking about it. Music, considered as the Wagnerian Gesamptkunstwerk, or total art work, is the work of a mastermind, or, in a less auteur-inspired framework, the work of a very small number of dedicated, likeminded individuals sharing a common artistic vision. We have been arguing that the ongoing transformations in 20th and 21st century music, as directly inspired by technological innovations, have shifted our understanding of what occurs in the production and reception of the Gesamptkunstwerk towards something we have termed "worlding." Important to our conception of worlding are practices like those of kaizen, although we should be wary of assuming too direct a correlation. Music production works through corporations, but that is not the same as understanding music as being produced within a corporation through the application of kaizen.
Nevertheless, kaizen can be said to reflect the always improving aspects of music production within a band and its collaborators—artists, producers, engineers, stage designers, and other fellow travelers. It is in precisely this sense that we emphasize that distributed nature of music production. Music, in fact, is one of the realms that pioneered the dispersement of production into a network of actors—human and non-human—and first took on a self-consciousness about what it was doing. In terms of kaizen, there is also an emphasis on continual change and improvement, yes, but we need to understand first of all that "improvement" is not the efficiency of a corporation (or, at least, that aspect is secondary or tertiary) but the furthering of experimentation.
In music, success is tied to factors such as new sounds and images, different ways of pleasing audiences, increasing access to channels of distribution, and so on. Yet all of these come back to some form of experimentation. Kaizen, reconceived in this manner, names an aspect of how music worlds; it names the relocation of inventional and productive practices into a dynamic, constantly changing network, keyed to continual and incremental change, albeit without the overarching organizational framework kaizen is typically tied to.
