How people write and talk about lean, a management concept, has consequences for how we think andact towards lean as a phenomenon in research as well as in practice. It is therefore important to studyhow discourses are used to prioritize specific views and the possible consequences of such use. To thateffect we have studied the implementation of lean in one private and one public organization from adiscursive psychology approach. There is however no consensus about what lean is or about theconsequences its interpretation might bring. Studying the discursive practices that position lean in textand talk it is clear that multiple discourses are used as a flexible resource on different discursive levels(individual text and talk, local discourses of the organization and societal discourses) to make sense ofthe implementation of lean. In this way we contributing to research on lean in a context of managementand organizational research by showing how discourses are deployed in interaction by people in textand talk to perform specific functions such as justify, legitimize, claim and criticize.