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Countries have been shown to be competitive in specific industries. This paper contends that this industrial specialization can be understood in terms of an affinity between national 'models of capitalism' and the characteristics of industrial task environments. Put differently, industry-specific competitiveness is conceived to arise out of a fit between patterns of national business systems and patterns of industrial task environments. Specifically, the paper will propose a relationship between the communitarian or individualistic nature of national business systems and the organization-specificity of knowledge in an industry. More communitarian business systems are thought to enjoy a competitive advantage in industries with a high organization-specificity of knowledge, i.e. in industries that rely more on the long-term accumulation of organization-specific knowledge within tightly-knit corporate communities. More individualistic business systems, on the other hand, are thought to enjoy a competitive advantage in industries with a low organization-specificity of knowledge, i.e. in industries that thrive more on the speedy dissemination or reallocation of company-unspecific knowledge through a constant reconfiguration of social relationships. The paper will offer some illustrations of these proposed relationships in terms of the competitive profiles of the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the transfer of Japanese supervisory practices to their Great Britain-based Japanese transplants and to the Great Britain-based emulators. To this end the paper is divided into three further sections. The first section briefly reviewing the state-of-the-debate on Japanization: was it a 'straw man' debate, is it yesterday's news or does it still retain some saliency? The second section will provide a context for the study of supervisory systems and the third will provide the results of a recent empirical study, before conclusions are drawn.

In this paper, the attractions of exposing the ideological dimensions of the thesis of Japanization of British manufacturing are set aside in favor of more basic objectives. The paper divides into four parts. The first shows how the preoccupation with Japanese methods has distorted the understanding of developments in the British manufacturing industry. Too much effort has been directed at understanding the operation of a small number of Japanese transplants; at the same time, the idea that there is a distinctively British pattern of organization has been played down. In the second section we use the concepts introduced originally by one of the authors to demonstrate the limited impact of both 'direct' and 'mediated' Japanization. The third section of the paper sets out the nature of the British manufacturing organization, bringing out its distinctive structural flexibility. The way in which it achieves this, the development of a form we have called the 'new flexible firm,' is explained in the paper's fourth section. Here we set out the combination of production technology, labor utilization and management control that characterizes much of British manufacturing.

This paper focuses on the human resource and shopfloor work organization aspects of the Japanese model of manufacturing in both Japan and Great Britain. 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 labor flexibility and multi-skilling; opportunities for shopfloor workers to improve the production process, via suggestion schemes and problem solving groups; and much greater responsibility for front line operators for a range of activities on the shopfloor, including quality monitoring and improvement, maintenance and personnel issues such as the selection of new members for work groups.

This paper presents evidence on the management of the labour process (and responses to it) at Rover and Peugeot-Talbot. The analysis of this material is intended to contribute to the wider debate on the claimed Japanization of British industry (Bratton, 1992; Oliver and Wilkinson, 1992) in three main ways. First, it will analyse existing studies of Japanization in terms of two major theoretical models — labelled the "diffusion" and the "bolt-on" model — together with their associated underpinning assumptions. Second, it will compare these models with the recent empirical evidence gleaned from Rover and Peugeot-Talbot. Third, it will outline an "adaptation model" of change based on this evidence. This model highlights the creative role played by both management and unions in responding to lean production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan is perceived in most advanced countries as the world leader in the introduction and exploitation of new management practices, particularly in the area of manufacturing. In an attempt to match Japan's economic progress other countries are seeking to introduce many of the systems which are believed to be the basis of Japanese success. In this article, certain aspects of a UK manufacturing company which had adopted a number of practices following studies undertaken in Japan, is compared with a Japanese owned company located in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic links between north-east England and Japan go back to the turn of the century, when Japan's first modern battle fleet was built by Armstrongs on Tyneside: no small irony, then, that British Shipbuilders (headquarters in Tyneside) should turn to the Japanese in the 1980s to re-learn how to build ships! Japanese direct manufacturing investment in Britain began in the early 1970s. One of the pioneer entrants, the bearing manufacturers NSK, started operations at Peterlee in mid-Durham in 1976. But the turning point for the north-east was, of course, Nissan's decision in 1984 to locate its British manufacturing operation at Washington New Town, near Sunderland. The number of Japanese companies in the north-east has since grown steadily. By the end of 1988, 20 Japanese companies were operating in the area between Teesside and the Tweed, involving 14 manufacturing plants. North-east England has the largest concentration of Japanese engineering plants in Europe, and a rapidly growing presence in electronics assembly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]