This paper is an outcome of my doctoral ethnographic fieldwork spanning over ten months in TKDWAG9, a constituent of VehicleCo, one of India's oldest and largest commercial vehicle manufacturing firms. The primary goal of the paper is to understand the interplay of managerial subjectivity with context and infrastructural constraints, including the reception of transplanted templates of change management and work reorganisation by senior and middle-level managers in brownfield plants. It also seeks to explore how competing priorities and managerial subjectivity negatively impacted corporate management's change management program at various levels of plant management. It also registers that this reluctance to embrace the change rhetoric extended to workers as well. The paper integrates managerial sense-making with the conception and operation of change management and lean manufacturing in brownfield automotive plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]   Copyright of International Journal of Employment Studies is the property of International Employment Relations Association (University of Technology, Sydney) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)