Japanization on the shopfloor
| Pages | 248-260 |
| Published date | 01 June 1998 |
| Date | 01 June 1998 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425459810228315 |
| Author | Nick Oliver,Rick Delbridge,James Lowe |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Employee
Relations
20,3
248
Japanization on the shopfloor
Nick Oliver
Judge Institute of Management Studies, University of Cambridge, UK,
and
Rick Delbridge and James Lowe
Cardiff Business School, Cardiff, Wales, UK
Introduction
As the West woke up to the remarkable performance of many Japanese
manufacturers, Japanese management practices became the holy grail for many
industrialists. Manufacturing methods excited particular interest and, during
the 1980s, wide-scale implementations of practices such as just in time
production, total quality control and team-based work organization, were
widely reported in the UK (Voss and Robinson, 1987). The strong Japanese
identity of many of these practices ensured that issues of the feasibility and
desirability of the transfer of these practices attracted widespread debate about
the “Japanization” phenomenon (Elger and Smith, 1994; Oliver and Wilkinson,
1992). This debate was extended by the publication of the influential The
Machine that Changed the World(Womack et al., 1990) which coined the phrase
“lean production”’ to describe a myriad of management practices found in their
purest form among Toyota and its suppliers in Japan, but allegedly transferable
anywhere in the world.
The Japanization debate has a number of strands to it. These include
questions about the reality and coherence of “Japanese” management principles
in Japan itself; the universality (or cultural specificity) of Jap anese methods, and
the implications of this for transfer to other contexts; questions about the
adoption of Japanese methods outside Japan and the impact of the methods on
the various actors involved in the production process (such as workers, unions,
and suppliers, etc.) (Abo, 1994; Dohse et al., 1985; Elger and Smith, 1994; Kenney
and Florida, 1993; Turnbull, 1988).
This paper focuses on the human resource and shopfloor work organization
aspects of the Japanese model in both Japan and the UK.
Human resource issues and the Japanese model
The basic human resource elements of the model include: shared destiny
relations between employee and employing organization; team-based work
organization on the shopfloor, including labour flexibility and multi skilling
Employee Relations,
Vol. 20 No. 3, 1998, pp. 248-260,
© MCBUniversity Press, 0142-5455
The data on which this paper is based are drawn from the World-Wide Manufacturing
Competitiveness survey. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Andersen
Consulting, and the contributions of Betty Thayer, Dan Jones, Isabelle Dostaler, Gillian Hunter,
Nick Rich, Sandra Rutherford, Paul Ryan and Gianni Zappala to this project.
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