Japanese productivity and quality standards have fired the imagination of American managers, but until now there has been little explanation of how to do it -- how to apply Japanese methods at the actual operating level of U.S. manufacturing plants. This book shows you how, exposing otherwise well-informed westernized readers to a new world of management ideas. Author Richard J. Schonberger demonstrates that the Japanese formula for success is based on a number of specific, interrelated techniques -- stunning in their simplicity -- and he shows how these techniques can be put to work in American industries today. Here, in a clear, handbook format, are nine "lessons" for American manufacturers, introducing scores of techniques aimed at simplifying the overly-complex purchasing, inventory, assembly-fine, and quality-control processes of U.S. firms. At the heart of Japanese manufacturing success are two overlapping strategies: "just-in-time" production and "total quality control." Some American manufacturers already know a little about these methods, but Richard Schonberger provides the most comprehensive description of these techniques available: how they developed, how they all fit together, why they are so potent, and how they "snowball" -- unleashing a powerful chain reaction of productivity and quality control improvements each time more simplification is introduced. -- Publisher description.

Japanese manufacturing investment in the European Community has grown dramatically over the last twenty years. At first, instances of investment were few, concentrated in a small number of industrial sectors. But since the mid-1980's there has been a surge of investment in a much wider range of industries. This volume details the growth of Japanese manufacturing investment in Europe in fourteen industrial sectors. The impact of Japanese competition and direct investment on European industries is considered in the context of the emergence of the three major trading blocs: the United States, Japan and the EC. Roger Strange concludes by making important policy recommendations, and arguing for the need for a new theoretical framework for assessing the political economy of foreign direct investment.

Japanese industry is the envy of the world for its efficient and humane management practices. Yet, as William Tsutsui argues, the origins and implications of "Japanese-style management" are poorly understood. Contrary to widespread belief, Japan's acclaimed strategies are not particularly novel or even especially Japanese. Tsutsui traces the roots of these practices to Scientific Management, or Taylorism, an American concept that arrived in Japan at the turn of the century. During subsequent decades, this imported model was embraced--and ultimately transformed--in Japan's industrial workshops. Imitation gave rise to innovation as Japanese managers sought a "revised" Taylorism that combined mechanistic efficiency with respect for the humanity of labor. Tsutsui's groundbreaking study charts Taylorism's Japanese incarnation, from the "efficiency movement" of the 1920s, through Depression-era "rationalization" and wartime mobilization, up to postwar "productivity" drives and quality-control campaigns. Taylorism became more than a management tool; its spread beyond the factory was a potent intellectual template in debates over economic growth, social policy, and political authority in modern Japan. Tsutsui's historical and comparative perspectives reveal the centrality of Japanese Taylorism to ongoing discussions of Japan's government-industry relations and the evolution of Fordist mass production. He compels us to rethink what implications Japanese-style management has for Western industries, as well as the future of Japan itself.

Explains the Deming Management Method that was created by the man who helped Japan learn about product quality and business management.

Manufacturing in Transition looks at the current state of British manufacturing within the global economy and asks whether manufacturing matters in the twenty first century.

First Published in 1998. This book examines the transferability of Japanese organizational practices to Japanese owned industrial transplants in the United States, and demonstrates that relations of power and conflict on the corporate structural level are equally as significant as the social and cultural differences between American and Japanese practices in the workplace. The research is based upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork at automotive transplants in the Midwest and high-tech transplants in California, as well as a case study company in New Mexico, and focuses primarily on their adaptation to the US industrial environment. Extensive interviews demonstrate that organizational practices of Japanese transplants are significantly different from either their Japanese or American counterparts. Relations of power at the case study company are examined in depth and reveal two contrasting forms of control. American managers tend to exert hierarchical control in the manufacturing department using a top down approach and clear distinctions between work and private lives. In contrast, the Japanese managers utilize what the author calls "poka-yoke" (fail-proof) control over the repair department. Poka-yoke control is characterized by strict attendance and dress codes, emphasizing loyalty and dedication to work. At the same time, the US. headquarters in New York and the parent company in Japan impose remote control, thus limiting the autonomy of local managers.

The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter. The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century--energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth--involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.