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Introduction: The paper attempts to understand value constellations in organising and using the business information service that was recently developed by various stakeholders with libraries who were in pursuit of supporting people's problem solving in Japanese public libraries. Method: In-depth interviews were conducted not only with users and librarians, but also with members from specialised organizations who participated in organising the service. Analysis: Tape-recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed to identify how the new set of services were designed and implemented in collaboration with organizations. Because the analysis was aimed to identify values recognised by those involved in designing, managing and using the services, an ethnomethodological approach was adopted as the approach is appropriate for understanding practical reasoning embedded in activities. Results: Two approaches (i.e. value constellations) in designing the service were identified, one is reference service oriented approach, where the reference service is located at the centre of the business information service and its transformation is carried out; and the other is specialised service, programme-oriented approach, where the service is organized with more reliance on outside specialists. Different emphases on various values were also identified in using the business information service. Conclusions: Close examination of value constellations as part of organizing and using the service seem to be an appropriate way to systematically understand and inform the actual services in relation to the use of such services. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper examines the prominence of written English on shop signs in Japan. Based on data from a larger empirical study into multilingual signs in Tokyo, the most common ways of using English and the roman alphabet on Japanese shops signs are identified. It is argued that the ambivalent nature of English loan words plays a key role in the ever growing visibility of English in Japanese public spaces. Focusing on one special type of sign--price lists outside hairdressers'--how the use of English loan words entail the general use of English and the Roman alphabet is shown, which in the long run results in signs completely functioning in English. (Contains 5 tables, 4 figures and 4 endnotes.)

Explores four themes at the 1998 APJRA conference - critical perspectives of accounting, organizational and institutional perspectives, public sector accounting in Japan and international accounting issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers new theoretical contributions and practical knowledge to existing leadership theories. Through a detailed study of the major corporation SoftBank, a Japanese company achieving business innovation at a global level in recent years, and insights gained on the leadership for organizational adaptability of practitioners driving strategic innovation, this paper presents a framework for 'holistic leadership' with a fractal nature as a complex adaptive system. In the three 'practice layers' of the 'formal organizational layer', 'psychological boundary layer (adaptive space)' and the 'informal organizational layer', practitioners (in the three management layers of top management, middle management and staff) dynamically use 'centralized leadership', 'dialectical leadership' and 'distributed leadership' and combine them depending on the situation, to achieve a balance between various contradictory elements such as the 'tug‐of‐war between efficiency and creativity', and demonstrate organizational adaptability. Through an in‐depth case study, this paper illustrates that holistic leadership in modern companies is a source of business innovation. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a new point of view regarding the knowledge management of new product and service development (NPSD), a high-tech field requiring the merging and integration of different technologies and business models. As case studies, we examine the dynamism of the knowledge creation process in NPSD at traditional Japanese telecommunication companies, as they merge and integrate the different elements of broadband wired and wireless network technologies and business models, and we analyse the new knowledge creation process of NPSD in two cases. In a short period of time, strategic teams at the companies formed strategic communities outside the company including customers, and then formed a network that transcended the strategic communities' boundaries. The synthesizing capability of the leadership-based strategic communities comprising community leaders inside the networked strategic communities enabled strategic teams to build new business models aimed at customers and achieved successful NPSD ahead of other competitors. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of small businesses to make and adjust to the paradigm shift needed to benefit from Japanese production theory has been questioned in the literature. Zangwill (1992) questioned limits of the Japanese Production Theory (JPT) and in a subsequent paper (Zangwill. 1994) to his argument about the limits of the Japanese Production Theory. In this paper, the Japanese Production Theory is first discussed, followed by a discussion of the consistency between traditional EOQ theory and the Japanese production theory, critique of the Zangwill's argument, and issues related to the relevance of the Japanese production theory to small businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide evidence of private information in the foreign exchange market. The evidence comes from the introduction of trading in Tokyo over the lunch hour. Lunch-return variance doubles with the introduction of trading, which cannot be due to public information since the flow of public information did not change with the trading rules. We then exploit microstructure theory to discriminate between the two alternatives: private information and mispricing. Four key results support the predictions of private-information models. Three of these involve changes in the intraday volatility U-shape. The fourth is that opening trade causes mispricing's share in variance to fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: To discuss measures to promote reuse in society, a holistic understanding of reuse businesses and markets is indispensable. This paper presents a simulation model for reuse businesses. To formulate the model, first, prerequisites for reuse businesses are outlined. The simulation model includes these prerequisites as its parameters, and its outcomes yield patterns of reuse markets. The paper presents the formulation of the model and simulation outcomes under four parameter settings. The correspondences between the simulation outcomes and case studies of reuse businesses in Japan are discussed to verify the propriety of the model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper extracts several dualistic constructs from the anthropological literature on Japan and interprets them in terms of recent understandings of paradox in organizational behaviour. Two historical and one contemporary illustration of these dualities within the Japanese business macroculture are offered. Each is interpreted using a normative, critical and paradox approach, and the different approaches are shown to constitute competing explanations of the phenomena. The findings are discussed in terms of how the dualities affect the dynamics of Japanese business conduct and how they reproduce a macroculture among the large business conglomerates. Insights are offered into how individual firm behaviour is shaped by dualistic features of the macroculture. Implications are drawn for how the conduct of cross-cultural business relationships and government policy may be informed by paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of medical care, technological advances, and the ageing of society have led to rising medical costs. As a result, there is a demand to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery systems, including public healthcare institutions, in order to ensure the sustainability of healthcare functions. In 2004, as part of national civil service reform in Japan, national hospitals were merged in order to form the National Hospital Organization (NHO). The NHO used new public management methods and was required to be self-financing and to maintain critical functions under a five-year management plan. The objective of this study was to examine whether the NHO was able to maintain its key function in the national infrastructure in terms of management. An analysis of the business conditions of the NHO was performed based on the financial statements from FY 2004 to FY 2018 using evaluation indexes. In the first and second periods, the NHO achieved its targeted management improvements. However, since FY 2014, even with the utmost restrictions on capital investment, the profits have not increased, and the free cash flow has been negative. Our results suggest that further organizational reforms are needed in order to sustain the NHO infrastructure in the long term and to withstand health crisis management during periods such as the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to increase the trading volume with Latin America, Japan had signed trade agreements with major local economies. However there is a lack of studies regarding the trading flow between those two regions. This paper has the main objective to estimate a cointegration relation between Japan and the four biggest economies in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, by the most traditional Johansen procedure and the Lütkepohl's which allows to deal with structural breaks. Regarding Johansen main results, only the Argentinian trading flows are cointegrated, however by Lütkepohl approach, the Brazilian and the Chilean imports equation are also cointegrated. As the estimated structural break is related to main monetary events in Argentina and Brazil this fact increases the significance of those results and the importance to deal with these break for international trade econometric modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence on the importance of geographical distance by investigating the relationship between distance and the share of two-way trade in total trade. Findings are not consistent with the widely held view that intraindustry trade (IIT) falls off rapidly across the entire distance scale. Distance is found to exert a decreasingly positive effect on the IIT share. U.S. trade with Japan and major industrial nations in Western Europe heavily influences this pattern. Two-way trade is not as distance sensitive as previously thought. It is important to understand how geographical distance affects HT because economic integration is more valuable when it allows countries to achieve greater specialization within the same industry. The insensitivity of the HT share to geographical distance suggests distance may not exert a major influence on the optimal degree of regionalization for industrial nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study of the reconsidered intra-industry trade wile referencing to Singapore's bilateral trade with Japan and the United States. Examination of the intra-industry trade between Singapore and Japan; Purpose of the paper; Development of a reformulated indexes to recompute Singapore's bilateral intra-industry trade with Japan and the United States.

This paper examines the role of the exchange rate in U.S. external adjustments. The results show that the ex change rate is an important transmission channel of influence on prices, and with longer lags, on income and the trade balance. The effects of the exchange rate and relative prices on the trade balance are not symmetric even in the long run. Exchange rate feedback is insignificant and makes little difference in trade balance adjustment. There are also indications that the response of relative prices to the exchange rate shifted in recent years. Such changes seem to help explain the persistence of the U.S. trade deficit in recent years for multilateral trade, but not bilateral trade, with Japan or Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract--Many attempts to estimate trade elasticities for Japan have yielded statistically insignificant or implausible results. One reason is that most previously estimated models have undoubtedly misspecified the adjustment of trade volumes to changes in relative prices. In this paper a generalized gamma distributed lag model of Japanese trade is estimated. The estimates confirm that the lags on responses to price changes are much longer than previous estimates have allowed. The estimates are then used to construct a "J-curve" for Japan [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at Japan's international trade practices, noting the tension between Japan and the U.S. as Japan's economic status grows closer to becoming a competitive threat. The author notes that the Japanese market is significantly more closed than the markets of most of the other advanced industrial nations. The unique character of Japanese business organizations and their distinctive relationships with one another and with the Japanese government provide major impediments to Japanese market accessibility. The entry of Motorola into the Japanese telecommunications market and their interaction with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) is discussed.

To investigate the actual phenomenon of transport on a complex network, we analysed empirical data for an inter-firm trading network, which consists of about one million Japanese firms, and the sales of these firms (a sale corresponds to the total in-flow into a node). First, we analysed the relationships between sales and sales of nearest neighbourhoods, from which we obtained a simple linear relationship between sales and the weighted sum of sales of nearest neighbourhoods (i.e. customers). In addition, we introduced a simple money transport model that is coherent with this empirical observation. In this model, a firm (i.e. customer) distributes money to its out-edges (suppliers) in proportion to the in-degree of destinations. From intensive numerical simulations, we found that the steady flows derived from these models can approximately reproduce the distribution of sales of actual firms. The sales of individual firms deduced from the money-transport model are shown to be proportional, on an average, to the real sales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the case of a virtual education business in Japan. Progression of the multimedia business; Details on virtual education business; Information on the expansion of the virtual education business through the customer value creation-type business.

Business ethics in Japan has developed in five stages. Especially in the last stage (in the 1990s), there have appeared two clear-cut trends in business ethics activities: positive and passive. For the rise of business ethics, the passive trend is much more important. Once entered the 1990s, an increasing number of business scandals have been revealed. Because of this, the Japanese business community cannot but help take business ethics much more seriously than it ever has. Not only business practitioners but also business ethicists have inaugurated a variety of ethics-related studies and activities. This article mainly puts focus on the studies, which have been done in the 1990s. At the end of the article, ethical challenges, which the Japanese business and academia meet presently, are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To analyze business fixed investment in Japan, which has been unusually volatile in recent years, we develop and apply a log-linear flexible accelerator model. We find that movements in business fixed investment are consistent with movements in output and the tax-adjusted cost of capital, both on average during our entire 1961-1994 sample and during the recent 1986-1994 business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 1915 essay "The Opportunity of Japan," Thorstein Veblen theorized that traditional Japanese institutions would undergo evolutionary change as Japan exploited borrowed industrial technology and became integrated into the global business enterprise system This article explains the recent liberalization of Japanese financial markets which followed Japan's rise to economic prominence within the context of Veblen's theory of institutional development of the enterprise system. The Japanese process of financial deregulation is reviewed. Veblen's predictions for Japan are Presented and an explanation provided for the liberalization of Japanese financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Proper age verification can prevent minors from accessing tobacco products. For this reason, electronic locking devices based on a proof-of age system utilising cards were installed in almost every tobacco vending machine across Japan and Germany to restrict sales to minors. Objective We aimed to clarify the associations between amount smoked by high school students and the usage of age verification cards by conducting a nationwide cross-sectional survey of students in Japan. Methods This survey was conducted in 2008. We asked high school students, aged 13-18 years, in Japan about their smoking behaviour, where they purchase cigarettes, if or if not they have used age verification cards, and if yes, how they obtained this card. Results As the amount smoked increased, the prevalence of purchasing cigarettes from vending machines also rose for both males and females. The percentage of those with experience of using an age verification card was also higher among those who smoked more. Somebody outside of family was the top source of obtaining cards. Surprisingly, around 5% of males and females belonging to the group with highest smoking levels applied for cards themselves. Conclusions Age verification cards cannot fully prevent minors from accessing tobacco products. These findings suggest that a total ban of tobacco vending machines, not an age verification system, is needed to prevent sales to minors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]