Is there one best way to run the modern business corporation? What is the appropriate balance between shareholders, executives, and employees? These questions are being vigorously debated as layoffs, scandals, and restructurings rattle companies around the world. The common assumption is that globalization is merging the varieties of corporate capitalism. Yet, as this book shows, corporations in Japan and the United States are responding differently to the pressures unleashed by globalization. In The Embedded Corporation, Sanford Jacoby traces this diversity to national differences in economic history and social norms, and, paradoxically, to global competition itself. The book's vantage point for exploring the varieties of capitalism is the human resource departments of large corporations, where changes in markets and technology turn into corporate labor policies affecting millions of workers. Despite some cross-fertilization, Japanese and American corporations maintain distinctive approaches to human resource management, which has important consequences for how firms compete, for corporate governance, and even for the level of inequality in Japan and the United States. The Embedded Corporation is a major contribution to our understanding of comparative management and the relationship between business, society, and the global economy.

After sweeping all before it in the 1980s, 'Japanese management' ran into trouble in the 1990s, especially in the high-tech industries, prompting many to declare it had outlived its usefulness. From the late 1990s leading companies embarked on wide-ranging reforms designed to restore their entrepreneurial vigour. For some, this spelled the end of Japanese management; for others, little had changed. From the perspective of the community firm, Inagami and Whittaker examine changes to employment practices, corporate governance and management priorities, in this 2005 book, drawing on a rich combination of survey data and an in-depth study of Hitachi, Japan's leading general electric company and enterprise group. They find change and continuity, the emergence of a 'reformed model', but not the demise of the community firm. The model addresses both economic vitality and social fairness, within limits. This book offers unique insights into changes in Japanese management, corporations and society.

Japanese corporate governance and managerial practice is at a critical juncture. At the start of the decade pressures mounted for Japan to move to a shareholder-value driven, 'Anglo-American' system of corporate governance. Subsequent changes, however, may be seen as an adjustment and renewal of the post-war model of the Japanese firm. In adapting to global corporate governance standards, Japanese managers have also been reshaping them according to their own agenda of reform and restructuring of decision-making processes. The board's role is seen in terms of strategic planning rather than monitoring, and external directors are viewed as advisers, not as representatives of the shareholders. Managers have adopted a variety of defences against hostile takeovers, including poison pills in some cases. Although shareholder influence is more extensive than it was, central aspects of the Japanese 'community firm' remain in place. The commitment to stable or 'lifetime' employment for a core of employees, although coming under severe pressure, is still an important point of reference for Japanese management. Corporate Governance and Managerial Reform in Japan is based on detailed and intensive field work in large Japanese companies and interviews with investors, civil servants, and policy makers in the period following the adoption of significant corporate law reforms in the early 2000s up to the months just before the global financial crisis of 2008. The Japanese experience suggests that there are limits to the global convergence of company law systems, and that the widespread association of Anglo-American practices with the 'modernization' of corporate governance has been misplaced. This conclusion is unlikely to be altered - it may be reinforced - by reactions to the financial crisis.

Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.

Debates regarding corporate governance have become increasingly important in Japan as the post-war model of bank-based, stakeholder-oriented corporate governance faces the new pressures associated with globalization and growing investor demands for shareholder value. Bringing together a group of leading scholars from economics, law, sociology and management studies, this book looks at how the Japanese approach to corporate governance and the firm have changed in the post-bubble era.The contributions offer a unique empirical exploration of why and how Japanese firms are reshaping their corporate governance arrangements, leading to greater diversity among firms and new 'hybrid' forms of corporate governance. The book concludes by looking at what effect these incremental buttransformative changes may have on Japan's distinctive variety of capitalism.

The globalization of capital markets since the 1980s has been accompanied by a vigorous debate over the convergence of corporate governance standards around the world towards the shareholder model. But even before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, the dominance of the shareholder model was challenged with regard to persisting divergences and national differences in corporate law, labor law and industrial relations. This collection explores this debate at an important crossroads, echoing Karl Polanyi's famous observation in 1944 of the disembeddedness of the market from society. Drawing on pertinent insights from scholars, practitioners and regulators in corporate and labor law, securities regulation as well as economic sociology and management theory, the contributions shed important light on the empirical effects on the economy of the shift to shareholder primacy, in light of a comprehensive reconsideration of the global context, policy goals and regulatory forms which characterize market governance today.