Abstract
Although Japanese management’s transformative impact on American managerial practice has long been recognized, its contribution to management theory in a range of fields has been less widely acknowledged. This article looks back on the influence of Japanese management on concepts, frameworks, and theories in four management fields: organization behaviour/organization studies, production and operations management, strategy, and international business. The review reveals three ways in which Japanese management had a significant influence on the development of management theory: legitimating and enriching one position in a contested management field; inspiring novel management concepts and frameworks; and providing rich data for testing and refining hypotheses based on established theory.
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Notes
This programme can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcG_Pmt_Ny4. I owed my move from a Sociology Department into a business school to this programme. My Ph.D. is in Sociology, with a specialization on organizations and social change in Japan, and in 1980 I was teaching in the Yale Sociology department. The programme created so much interest in Japan that I was asked to teach a course in the Yale School of Management, and this meant that when MIT Sloan School of Management was searching in 1982 for a social scientist who was a Japan specialist and could teach in a business school, my name showed up on a very short list, and I spent the next 25 years teaching at MIT.
When his father died in the mid-1970s, Johnson/Pascale learned that the family name was originally Pascale, and that Johnson was the name adopted when the family moved to the U.S. He decided to return to the original name. One consequence is that the origins of The Art of Japanese Management (Pascale and Athos 1981) in the study with Ouchi were only recognized when Pascale erupted in fury over what he saw as Ouchi’s misrepresentation in Theory Z of the significance of Ouchi’s role in that study, and demanded a reprinting of a revised first section of the book. Pascale also pointed out that Ouchi’s only visit to Japan before the publication of Theory Z was in 1974, for the joint project.
The term ‘lean production’ was coined by John Krafcik, an IMVP research associate who came to MIT Sloan School as a graduate student after working at NUMMI (Krafcik 1988). Krafcik went on to a position in Ford, then become CEO of Hyundai’s American manufacturing unit, and in mid-2017 become the CEO of Google’s new enterprise to manufacture a self-driving car.
Shige Makino pointed out to me that his was not the first publication to use these data: Hennart (1991) was the first and only researcher to use these data before the development of the data-base at Ivey.
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Westney, E. Reflecting on Japan’s contributions to management theory. Asian Bus Manage 19, 8–24 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41291-019-00079-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41291-019-00079-x