Chapter III

'Japanization'

The foreshadowing of Alexandre Kojeve

[The Japanese sense of selflessness] seems to
allow one to believe that the recently begun
interaction between Japan and the Western World
will finally lead not to the rebarbarization
[Americanization] of the Japanese but to a
'Japanization' of the Westerners.[86]

  This often quoted excerpt from a footnote by Alexandre Kojeve to the 1959 edition of his 1938-l939 lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit foreshadowed the West' s view of Japan as the next stage of industrial progress two decades later.  In keeping with Hegel's valuation of the
self outside of historical time, Kojeve identified a 'non-individualistic' quality in postwar Japan that he believed was evidence of the most dynamic manifestation of human civilization in the modern age. To Kojeve, compared to the Western Judeo-Christian historically-conscious self, the Japanese sense of self was 'post-historical, ' or transcendent of history, in part, through Zen Buddhism's anti-historical temporal-spiritual emphasis.
  Kojeve's appropriation of Japanese culture was not the first example of 'Orientalism' whereby Europeans idealized Asian cultural traits which seemed to be lacking in western societies.[87] Voltaire idealized the Chinese Confucian bureaucracy and its apparent meritocracy in the eighteenth century, believing that it had put into practice an equivalent form of Plato's philosopher rulers.[88]  Kojeve's observation, by his distinguishing Japanese and American
world views and their respective methods of industrial production, however, was the first example of such an idealization in the context of the post-Second World War industrial (or post-industrial) period.
  His use of the term Japanization was in the same spirit as Britain's during the 1980s and early 1990s when labor and management applied it and other Japanese terms to legitimize reforms of traditional production methods and industrial relations. A variety of political and economic factors combined with this cultural appropriation to create what many British observers termed, a 'new industrial relations.'

Margaret Thatcher and the Japanese model

  As double digit unemployment and inflation drained the pride out of many British in the late l970s and 1980s, and criticism of labor and management and their related institutions intensified under the auspices of the 'British disease,' a majority of reform-minded British elected Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and continued electing her until changes were initiated. Within her three consecutive terms between l979 and 1990 (the longest reign for a Prime Minister in over a century) a recognizable shift occurred in traditional methods of industrial relations and production. Although her fans attributed the 'new realism, or 'new industrial relations, ' to 'Thatcherism' it could be argued that her policies were successful because they syncretized with aspects of the Japanese 'model' which had gained credence among managers and labor alike during the same period.
  An excerpt from Thatcher's memoirs as prime Minister, The Downing Street Years, reflected the simplified, positive view she shared with the popular literature about Japanese achievement during the 1980s:

Much of the criticism of the Japanese was unfair.
They were everybody's scapegoat. The Japanese
should not have been blamed for prudently saving
more - and so having more to invest at home,
overseas or, indeed, financing the U.S. budget
deficit. Nor should the Japanese be blamed for
producing first-class cars, cheaper video
recorders and advanced cameras, bought eagerly by
western consumers. Yet in both cases they
were.[89]

During her eleven years as Prime Minister, Thatcher travelled to Japan frequently, meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, members of the Japanese Federation of Industries (Keidanren) , and even the president of Nissan Motor Company, to court more Japanese investment in Britain.
Recalling a meeting with Prime Minister Nakasone in June 1984 Thatcher comented that

He said that half of the Japanese companies now
established within the European Community were in
the United Kingdom. 'Not enough,' I replied. 'I
would like two dozen more.' He went away in no
doubt about the welcome Britain would accord to
Japanese investment.[90]

Thatcher's efforts were well rewarded and happened to coincide with Japan's trams-national corporate needs; for in the second half of the decade, the number of Japanese firms beginning production grew to five times the levels of the previous ten years.[91]  Other factors making Japanese investment in the UK more likely were Britain's high unemployment and low wages relative to Europe throughout the 1980s, and the English language, which was the international business language and the main foreign language taught in Japan. Japanese companies also needed a base protected from European Community tariffs to export more profitably.[92] Margaret Thatcher's policies further complied with these needs in their rejection of the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty thereby preserving 'employers ' freedom from over-regulation and under-flexibility of labor.''[93]
  Thatcher's labor legislation, specifically designed to 'cure the British disease' also synchretized with the needs of Japanese direct investment.[94] The six acts that Thatcher passed during the 1980s helped to decentralize the command structure of labor for the first time in over a century. After the 'winter of discontent' in 1982, even union members, by electing Thatcher for a second term, evidenced their readiness for structural changes. The resulting Labor Acts helped to diminish the power of unions in the name of 'protecting individual rights' of non-union employees and union members who were not in favor of striking.[95] From the late 1980s, workers' consent by secret ballot would be required before a strike could be protected by law.[96] By the end of the decade, because of this legislation and the concurrent influences of the Japanese TQM/JIT 'model,' union membership declined by 15% and the number of days lost to strikes dropped to their lowest levels since l950.[97]
  Thatcher's anti-union legislation accentuated the restructuring required in adapting the TQM/JIT model in the workshop. An AEU shop steward's coments explained the effect of the restructuring on unions:

Let's be honest, all this cellular manufacture
is destroying trade unions, that's what its all
about. [In the future] we won't be talking as
parochial trade unionists around the table, we'll
be speaking solely for the people on the site. I
would think our jurisdiction over people in that
environment would be of a lesser nature than it is
at this point in time . . . without a shadow of a
doubt.[98]

'Cellular manufacturing' was an operational aspect of TQM/JIT manufacturing design that replaced traditional trade-based manufacturing shop-floor configurations with arrangements according to the product or part produced. In traditional British and American Fordist/Taylorist settings, a worker was usually certified and protected by the union for operating one tool which was often disconnected from the end product which followed a chaotic course all over the shop floor to the finish. In this system, the thouroughput time, or time the product required to final assembly, was highly inefficient. That is why it required end of line inspections, defect quotas, large inventories of parts, and a multi-tiered management structure.
  In adapting cellular manufacturing, a central feature of the TQM/JIT system, machine tools were made mobile and grouped according to the end product for higher 'just-in time' (JIT) flexibility to the market demands which changed from week to week. Thouroughput time and lead time, the time required for workers to set up for manufacturing a new product, decreased four to five times using the new system.  This product-centered production design therefore required 'flexible skills' for the variety of machines in the product cell in which all of the workers were now jointly responsible. In theory, because the flexible stills now centered on a product, workers would have more 'ownership' of the product and its quality, and they could therefore be held more accountable for it than they were in the Fordist/Taylorist system. This new configuration effectively overrode many traditional union and management authority structures.

Trends in industry since Margaret Thatcher

  Over the course of the l980s and early l990s, as British firms experimented with the Japanese model, government agencies completed several extensive surveys which traced changing work practices and attitudes among over a million workers working in thousands of firms."[99]
These extensive surveys are useful to the thesis because they were conceived out of official concern over the industrial relations crisis of the 'British disease' and did not seek to prove any specific Japanese influences.  Nevertheless, the findings revealed a significant shift in traditional practices and attitudes in the direction of the Japanese 'model.' Between 1980 and 1990, the percentage of workers classified as 'manual' ('unskilled' or 'semiskilled') declined while the number of 'skilled' employees remained stable. Since the number of 'skilled' employees did not decline during the period, these findings are supportive of the contention that the restructuring required in adapting the Japanese 'model' did not 'de-skill, ' or diminish the task complexity of 'skilled' (certified tradespeople) as automated manufacturing made many skills obsolete.
  'De-skilling' and resultant 'alienation' from the product, as the new technology takes precedence, has been a concern of labor and intellectuals since the Luddites in the First Industrial Revolution, and has been a hotly debated topic in regard to the Japanese model because it purports to bring 'ownership' of the product back to the worker through its 'multi-skilling' arrangements and continuous employee education programs. The surveys did not seek to verify adaption of the multi-skilling ideals of the Japanese model specifically, but the surveys did verify an increase in the number of in-company training programs.[100]  There was also evidence of a new diffusion of managerial responsibilities to production-line workers

away from a concentration on collective bargaining
and the control and containment of adversarial
relationships between managers and managed,
towards the generation of greater employee
comitment . . . unifying management structures
and processes rather than extending their
fragmentation . . . [and] incorporat[ing] in
the tasks of all employees with management and
supervisory responsibilities. [101]

The most distinguishable change (more than ten percentage points) over the decade was a decline in union membership and employers' associations.[102] The survey found that informal, in-firm agreements on wages, hours, working conditions, etc. had begun to replace the formal, regional and industry-wide bargaining agreements that had been in place for over a century.
  Augmenting this decline in the stature of unions, another general survey that traced trends between 1980 and 1990, and found that across the board representation in managerial comittees had increased from 26.3% to 35%.[103] The same survey found that management's view toward unions had also changed from a largely negative appraisal to a more favorable one.[104] Taken together, these surveys showed that measurable changes occurred in British industrial practices and thinking toward a 'new industrial relations,' in the image of the Japanese model.

The Spectrum of 'Japanization'

  A number of scholars familiar with the Japanese model and its application in industry made assertions that the new industrial relations was the result from a Japanization of British Industry. The first study on this relationship was a 1986 case-study by Peter Turnbull titled, 'The
Japanization of industrial relations and production at Lucas Electric.' In response to this article and the rapidly expanding Japanese investment in South Wales, Nick Oliver and Barry Wilkinson (business and economic historians at the Universities of Cambridge and Cardiff, South Wales) organized a conference on the subject at the University of Cardiff.[105] Subsequent studies and books were completed covering a wide range of analysis, most in response to the
conclusions drawn by Oliver and Wilkinson, and two influential American studies which further substantiated the British argument that successful adaption of the Japanese model was proceeding in the West.[106]
  Oliver and Wilkinson's surveys of a third of the top 1000 manufacturing firms in 1988 and in 1992 found that over half of British and American firms in a wide variety of product lines in Britain had implemented, or were in the process of implementing, TQM/JIT-related methods in the work-place. Their findings corresponded with the above-cited surveys in that there had been a measurable decrease in traditional management structures in favor of more informal methods derived from the Japanese model, i.e., group-based working arrangements, cellular manufacturing, quality circles, continuous improvement (kaizen), and kanban-controlled methods of production.  The surveys found that managers had even invoked the term 'Japanization' to legitimize changes in the work-place.[107]
  The comments of a manager at Lucas Electric exemplified the ideological appeal of the model during the 1980s:

Most people involved can see the logic in what
we're doing . . . [I]t's really simple, Japanese
methodology is simple, they like it, they can
understand it, and there's tremendous co-operation
from the workforce.[108]

The power of the myth of the Japanese model in legitimizing reforms toward a more participative, managerially inclusive space was further verified by the failure to adapt an American management model called 'human resource management' (HM) during the previous decades. This 'kinder and gentler' form of American managerialism had been offering empirical evidence that a more humane and participative style of management could lead to higher efficiency since the Hawthorne experiments at Bell Labs in the 1930s.  Despite its development as a field in business schools in the post-Second World War period, however, mutual mistrust
between management and labor made HM's tenets of full participation sound suspicious, especially in Britain where labor was in control and corporate management was still embryonic. A personnel manager at Flowpak, a mid-sized, (500-1000 employee) packaging machine manufacturer, said that 'participation' had developed such negative connotations during the decade before the introduction of the Japanese TQM/JIT model that the word had to be avoided
altogether in establishing the new 'informal comunications' between cellular work-groups and management.[109] It took Japan's non-Western transformation of Deming's SPC into TQM and JIT to give 'full participation' a legitimate structure of operation.

'Direct Japanization'

  The first demonstration effect of the Japanese 'model' occurred at 'greenfield' cites, or cites without previous industrial production histories, where Japanese managers of new firms pioneered the first 'no-strike' agreements in Britain. Ackroyd et.al. (1988) referred to the
demonstration effect of Japanese direct investment as 'direct Japanization.'[110] The new agreements with unions, made more possible in the anti-union climate of the Thatcher years, guaranteed that each side (labor and management) would have to submit to binding arbitration by an outside mediator in case of an unresolvable conflict. These developments were significant in British industrial history because they represented a break from the century-old 'right-to-strike' view of unions as the 'rightful' owner of labor as a commodity, or factor of production.[111] It also potentially called into question management's prerogative to exploit labor.
  Following the lead of Toshiba (the first Japanese company to secure a no-strike deal) , several American and British companies operating in Britain concluded similar agreements. They also formed company councils, which effectively by-passed traditional, formal bargaining procedures between management and unions. The demonstration effect of green field cites and their emulation by Western firms in turn prompted industry-wide changes in the function and image of many unions in the workplace. Because non-union employees were now equally represented in the company councils, the role and image of unions changed considerably in many firms. The agreements and shop floor designs even affected closed-shop factories (firms with one union; 100% membership) transforming the union's role into a more managerial one. With membership declining, unions now had to create new images and compete with other unions to recruit new members. For example, the GMB (General, Municipal, Boilermakers, and Allied Trades) Union changed its slogan from 'Unity is Strength,'  to 'Welcoming, Lively, and Friendly.' [112]
  On the national level, the transformation of union roles caused infighting among the member unions of the once politically influential TUC (Trade Union congress). As a result, it lost considerable clout in the minority Labour party. The TUC even suspended one union, the EBTPC
(Electrical, Electronic, Telecomunication and Plumbing Union) , for persisting in negotiations with management despite a TUC ultimatum. The coments of the TUC chairman, Norman Willis, that the union's actions were a 'breach of working-class morality, ' exposed again the fundamental rethinking of views regarding work and the traditional moral spaces affected by adapting the Japanese 'model.'[113]
  In the context of Norman Willis's coment, moral space refers to an area of comon affiliation defined by explicit and implicit boundaries of authority and responsibility as within organized labor and management in the traditional British and American firm.  Within the boundaries of the
moral space there is mutual trust among affiliates regarding their intentions to strive for the well- being of the space.  The sense of trust in the moral space can be compared to the Japanese sense of amae which has similar connotations and refers to the conditions within a common space of shared interests and mutual dependency.[114]  The boundaries between the spaces were constructed on patterns of entrusting authority and responsibility at a multitude of levels which
the diagnosticians of the 'British disease' contended had origins in educational institutions where habits of delegating (or entrusting) authority and responsibility to students and to certain schools helped establish the boundaries.
  The restructuring and rethinking required in adapting the 'firm as community' was especially difficult for the affiliates of the space of management, who until then had been vested with full authority and responsibility of the factory, the 'factors' of production, it profits and losses.  The space's exclusivity was often further enhanced by management's executive apparel, the exclusive dining room, plush offices, and private parking lot.[115]  In adapting the Japanese model, managers often had to give up these amenities of distinction in favor of a comon uniform, cafeteria, parking lot, and time on the shop floor instead of the office. Many managers could not make the leap, or 'take the demotion' as one manager put it, and chose rather to be creative with the ideological mystique of the Japanese model. Their creativity sometimes led to misusing the
TQM/JIT lexicon (i.e. , kaizen, kanban, ringi, and jidoka) altogether to reinforce their traditional prerogatives. Ackroyd (1986) categorized these examples of management's
'hidden agenda' in a cloak of the Japanese model as "mediated Japanization II."

'Mediated Japanization II'

  There were several examples of management taking advantage of the ideological appeal of the Japanese model.  A good one was kanban, an aspect Of JIT originated at Toyota Motors, which really only described the system of attaching special signs (kanban) to certain assembly units to warn operators to skip over them on the production line.  Elger and Smith (1994) found that a personnel manager of a British food processor was using the term to legitimize intensifying the work of employees who were not laid off. The manager said that they had 'kanbanned' the remaining staff.[116]
  An earlier study of Japanese firms in Britain by Trevor and White revealed that management consistently had the most difficulty accepting the Japanese model.[117]   This difficulty might begin to explain management's creative use of the model. The line workers at one firm comented that

in the early days when Japanese influence had
been stronger, relationships had been easier,
whereas British managers left on their own, tended
to put up the traditional barriers .   .   .   the
Japanese told us that everyone would wear the same
uniform, but now the old demarcation is creeping in .  .  .

Malcolm and Trevor found that British workers viewed the Japanese firm 'very much as an opportunity to break away from the class divisions typical of British industry,' whereas British mangers saw it as a hinderance to their traditional prerogative.[119]
  In another study conducted in the late 1980s, an interview with a manager implementing 'single status' facilities in the image the Japanese model revealed the difficulty of reconceiving management in adapting the Japanese model. A foreman commented,

I spent 20-30 years of people telling me that when
you get promoted and when you move on you take the
overalls off and put on a white coat or a suit on.
And for 20 years I dreamed about the day I would
go to work with a tie on and polished shoes and
suit . . . that all had to go out the window
here.[120]

Oliver and Wilkinson found in their case studies that the structural shift to cellular manufacturing instilled a degree of 'trauma' for managers because

such a dramatic reorganization essentially redraws
the organizational map with all that implies
for territories, resources and power relations.
As previously centralized departments, such as
maintenance and production engineering, are
dismantled and their staff are dispersed amongst
teams or cells, 'empires' disappear--to the
understandable chagrin of their emperors. . . .
[Thus] many saw this return to the shop floor from
their office-based positions in a centralized
function as a demotion.[121]

  Two case studies in Elger and Smith et.al. (1994) provided further examples of misuse of the 'model' in South Wales to benefit traditional managerial authority.[122]
  John Bratton's (1992) case study of Servo, a supplier for Ford Motor Company UK showed most clearly through employee interviews the contradiction management faced in adapting.
In the name of TQM/JIT, Servo's management took advantage of the anti-union political climate and reorganized production, but, in doing so, reinforced their authority over operations using 'computer-numerically-controlled' (CNC) software.  This software performed the SPC analysis supposed to be delegated to the cellular manufacturing teams,' so management was able to replace skilled workers with semi-skilled laborers whose new job consisted of mere 'button
pushing. ' [123]
  An operator's coment revealed the traditional spirit of mistrust between labor and management:

I would say that they [management] know from day
to day every move everybody makes . . ' Every
move you make is monitored. When you clock on the
computer, they know how many components good or
bad you have turned out. . . . [124]

A cell leader argued that if the responsibility was given to the workers

. . . we would be having different levels of
quality because you would have people altering
programs willy-milly,. reducing feeds and speeds
and God knows what. Getting a quick way round and
everything that goes with it.[125]

Although this course of action contradicted the TQM philosophy of 'total' delegation of responsibility, and sacrificed the company's long-term flexibility and responsiveness to the market, the company still claimed that its production improvements resulted from implementation of the Japanese model.

'Mediated Japanization I'

  A look at the 'sincere' use of the Japanese 'model' in the category of 'Japanization I' revealed different dynamics and challenges posed by the 'Japanizing' of traditional methods. Whereas the previous case study of Servo showed how management 'de-skilled' its workers and preserved (and even increased) its traditional power-base through CNC machine tools, the case study of F1owpak, a UK-based food and drink machinery multinational, showed how a 'pure' application of the Japanese model 'up-skilled' employees. Flowpak increased, or 'up-skilled,' workers' knowledge and responsibilities through the cellular manufacturing arrangements.[126]
  Flowpak made each manufacturing cell a semi-autonomous 'mini-factory' in charge, not only of its own production quality, but also that of its suppliers with whom the team now had to deal directly on co-purchasing and co-designing of parts.  These functions were previously delegated to the purchasing and engineering departments. The mini-factory responsibilities of Flowpak's cells responsibilities of Flowpak's cells even included a budget for tool purchases and the authority to refuse parts from other cells if the quality was not up to their standards.[127] These practices were consistent with the Japanese ideal that each employee was able to stop (by
shouting 'jidoka') the whole production line should a defective product arise. [128]
  There were other 'sincere' adaptions of the model at Flowpak. In contrast to Servo's cell supervisors, who did not work the machines (in the British tradition of the foreman) , Flowpak cell leaders worked right along with the machine operators, filling in where necessary (in the
Japanese tradition). Flowpak also replaced the traditional pay-by-rate system, based on an individual's short-term production, with a Japanese-like flat-rate pay system for all skilled employees. Regarding the new pay system, the senior manager stated:

As soon as people realized that there was no
personal peculiar advantage in hiding bits of
knowledge, being inflexible, hogging the good
jobs, and sticking to their machine and all that .
. ' [I]t was like suddenly turning the key.[129]

Although the 'key' did not open every door (there was still traditional friction between trained engineers and apprenticed operators), Flowpak was able to increase cooperation between workers significantly enough to eliminate its personnel, quality inspection, and inventory
departments.[130] Through the implementation of TQM/JIT methods, Flowpak' s thouroughput increased five-fold, productivity increased by 25%, and its unit operating costs decreased by 11%.[131]  These figures were consistent with the improvements noted by a majority of companies ('sincere' and 'insincere') surveyed by Oliver and Wilkinson (1988; 1992).
  Despite Flowpak's increased productivity and worker participation, there were problems. According to interviews with managers and machine operators, workers now felt a new moral obligation to 'put a full day in' because everyone, from operators to executive managers, was now in the 'same boat.'[132]  Furthermore, 'informal chats' became preferable to traditional union-mediated formal negotiations.  Because of the emphasis on 'informal chats' rather than traditional union-mediated formal negotiations, one cell leader commented, 'people actually know who the managing director  is,. . . . he is actually trying to comunicate.'[133]  The union convener concurred that

Management and unions do what's good for each
other all the time. my do we need a bit of
paper? I trust them implicitly and they trust me
exactly the same.[134]

But the coments of a manager who said that he would like to see 'a little more motivation' and 'work' out of the employees showed that this trust is tentative.[135]  Comments by operators who frequently referred to the CNC programmers as "'office wallahs' whose 'lack of shop floor experience' renders their planning instructions highly suspect . . ." also indicated that traditional antagonisms between shop floor and management persisted.
  The main problem with adapting the model at Flowpak and at other companies studied by Oliver and Wilkinson (1992), Ackroyd et.al. (1988), and Elger and Smith et.al. (1994) involved the implementation of systems of continuous review and improvement (kaizen) of the existing production system.  Despite the adoption of flat-rate payments to skilled employees, workers were so accustomed to 'on-cost' production, a team leader explained, that 'sometimes you have to handcuff some people to keep them from working units tagged with a kanban. [136]
  A few scholars have attributed such problems to traditional accounting methods which were still entrenched in Fordist/Taylorist post-production methods. Whereas Japanese accounting methods calculated 'rates of activity,' or measurable efficiency improvements in the crucial set-up time in the TQM/JIT system, British and American methods still focused primarily on 'rates of production' per standard work hour and individual workers' 'piece rates.' These post-production methods of 'on-cost' accounting 'worked against the ethos of small-batch production in the JIT system' because they did not vest managerial responsibilities and accounting tools for improvement in the hands of the workers themselves.[137] Again, entrusting such authority and responsibility would require a 'breach' in the traditional boundaries. Making matters more problematic was the failure of Western accountants to develop a technique to account for such in-process changes in the TQM/JIT system.
  If improvements were achieved during the off-time resulting from the passing over 'kanbanned' units, often the cell team which made the improvement applied the time savings to an extended break for the group.[138]  The Japanese manager who observed this 'hogging' of a savings found it hard to imagine that the team would not share the savings with the company. Other comon 'social-related' problems included reluctance of many workers to initiate improvement projects in quality circles. Over a seven-year period, Oliver and Wilkinson found increased employer
ratings as 'unsuccessful,' in group-based activities such as quality circles, where innovation and improvement are supposed to take place. [139]

An assesment--boundaries in the workplace

  The preceding surveys and case studies showed that measurable, yet variable, changes occurred as a result of adapting the Japanese model. The combination of Margaret Thatcher's labor legislation and the 'demonstration effect' of 'direct Japanization' led a slight majority of
manufacturing firms to experiment with flexible working arrangements in cellular manufacturing configurations.  While some companies preserved traditional authority structures through computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines and forced the Japanese managerial lexicon over traditional British patterns of control, other companies attempted to diffuse managerial responsibilities in the image of the Japanese TQM/JIT model. It is notable that firms in the latter category of 'Japanization I' had stronger union control than the former 'hidden agenda' category. This fact, combined with the evidence that management had the most difficulty with their 'demotions' adapting to the Japanese 'model' revealed that strong unions were essential to protecting the workers from management's traditional 'hidden agenda.'  With fewer legal protections, declining union membership, and an increasing number of strike' deals made with management, effective unions had to adapt quickly through new images and a more managerial role to meet the mixed bag of challenges. Creative and flexible unions proved to be essential to the whole TQM/JIT system.
  Because of the high dependency relations between assemblers and their suppliers and minimal lead-time for orders in JIT, if labor conditions up the line of production among suppliers were not nurturing of responsible autonomy and more trusting relations between management and labor, wildcat strike would effectively shut down the whole 'just in-time' chain of production within days.  In 1988 this series of events occurred at Ford when a strike by a supplier in Britain shut down assembly plants across Europe. Ford was among the first of Western manufacturers to apply the Japanese 'model' and was the first to suffer the consequences of Britain's traditional boundaries within industry.
  After this experience, 'parent companies' like Ford, IBM, GM, Jaguar, and others required that their suppliers become certified and audited by national standards for the 'social quality' of their production system as well as the product quality.  Parent companies thought that such checks
would increase the stability and market responsiveness of the high dependency, fragile TQM/JIT system.[140]  Western firms also emulated Japanese no-strike deals in attempt to stabilize relations between employees, suppliers and assemblers.
  These national auditing directives and legal agreements, however, could not solve the de-skilling and related problems encountered by employees at Servo and similar cases reviewed in Elger and Smith et.al. (1994).  Moreover, national standards could not train workers to initiate analysis for continuous improvement (kaizen), the biggest problem of all firms implementing the Japanese 'model,' and according to many Japanese managers of firms in
Japan, the most important feature of the model.[141]
  Part of the explanation for British problems with continuous improvement was attributed to Britain's different accounting methods, but that does not explain the reluctance of labor and management to initiate improvements. Other scholars have pointed to the institutions underlying
traditional industrial relations spaces. Like the diagnosticians of the 'British disease,' Elger and Smith (1994) attributed the problem to the 'institutional settlement' of the nineteenth century. Dore (1973) similarly argued that Japan's management structures were dependent in part on the country's 'late development' (compared to Britain) and related 'social-technology educational' institutions.  The most notable structural difference was Japan's lack of business schools and the
accompanying profession of management comparable to America and Britain. This difference also reflected Japan's fundamentally different approach to management education.   Robert I. Cole (1989) made similar observations in pointing out the significance of Japan's grass-roots training of group working stills in Japan.[142]  The boundaries between labor and management and their institutional corollaries under the surface of industrial relations, then, are significant to interpreting the dynamics of Japanization, and deserves further exploration.

ENDNOTES

[86] From a footnote by Kojeve in his "Interpretation of the Third Part of Chapter VII of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Conclusion), in Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp.161-62.  Kojeve was a Russian-born scholar who emigrated to France and became famous for his lectures on the German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831).  His comments stem from a trip he made to Japan in 1959. His idealization of the Japanese self paralleled Hegel's idealization of the self transcendent above traditional  (historical) subject/object oppositions.[back to text]

[87] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).[back to text]

[88] For Voltaire's most famous depiction of the Chinese, see Jean Francious Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV (l75l) translated by Maryn P. Pollack (London: Dent, 1961) , pp.452-460.[back to text]

[89] Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: Harper Collins, 1993) , pp.495-6.[back to text]

[90] Ibid., p.498.[back to text]

[91] Production start-ups for 1972: 2; 1974: 2; 1975: 1; 1976: 2; l978: 5; 1979: 3; 1980: 3; 1981: 1; 1982: 4; 1983: 1; 1984: 2; 1985: 10; 1986: 10; l987: 23; 1988: 22; 1989: 21; l990: 3l; 1991: 12; 1993: 3. Source: Japan External Trade Organi z ation , compiled in Roger Strange, Japanese Manufacturing Investment in Europe: Its Impact on the UK Economy (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.247-53.[back to text]

[92] Roger Strange found that over fifty percent of what was produced in Japanese firms in Britain during the 1980s and early 1990s was exported to the European mainland. Strange 1993: 146,' 256-8.[back to text]

[93] "Inward Investment: Why Here,' in The Economist 326(7800) 27 February 1993, pp.60-61.[back to text]

[94] See Shirley Robin Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism (London: Transaction, 1993), p.138; and B.C. Roberts, "Trade Unions," in The Thatcher Effect, Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldom et. al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p.66.[back to text]

[95] The hployment Acts of 1980, 1982, 1988, and the Trade Union Act of 1984. Described in John Bratton,  Japanization at Work: Managerial Studies for the 1990s (London: Macmillan,
1992), p.6.[back to text]

[96] Roberts 1989: 64-8.[back to text]

[97] Ibid., p.73.[back to text]

[98] These are the coments of an jhalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) shop steward cited in Nick Oliver and Barry Wilkinson,  The Japanization of British Industry: New Developments in the 1990s (London: Blackwell, 1988, 1992), p.156.[back to text]

[99] Sponsors of the 1980, l984, and 1990 surveys included the Employment Department, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Policy studies Institute, and the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration service, the findings of which are recorded and interpreted in Veil Millward, Mark Stevens, David Smart, and W.A. Hawes, Workplace Industrial Relations in Transition: The ED/ESRC/PSI/ACAS Surveys  (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1992).[back to text]

[100] Ibid., pp.25,. 178.[back to text]

[101] Ibid., p.26.[back to text]

[102] Ibid., p.45.[back to text]

[103] From the survey conducted by Michael Pools and Roger Mansfield, "Patterns of Continuity and Change in Managerial Attitudes and Behaviour in Industrial Relations, 1980-1990,"
in the British Journal of Industrial Relations (March 1993), 31(1).[back to text]

[104] Ibid. Managers strongly agreeing that "trade unions have too much power:" 1980--82%, l990--31.7%; that "trade unions have more power than management:" 1980-'52.9%, 1990--
14.1%; that "trade unions are not acting in the country's economic interests:" 1980-'40.4%, 1990--11.4%.

[105] Peter Turbull, "The 'Japanization' of Production and Industrial Relations at Lucas Electrical,' Industrial Relations Journal 17(3), l986, pp. 193-206.[back to text]

[106] Besides the works already cited in the thesis by Oliver and Wilkinson (1988, l992) and Bratton (1992), other works directly related to the debate included S. Ackroyd, G. Burrell, M. Hughes, and A. Whitaker, 'The Japanization of British Industry?,' Industrial Relations Journal, 19 (1) , 1988: 11-23;  I. Graham, 'Japanization as Mythology,' Industrial Relations Journal, 19(1) , 1988: 69-75;  S. McKenna, 'Japanisation and Recent Developments in Britain,' Employee Relations, 10(4) , 1988: 6-12;  S.J. Wood, 'Japanization and/or Toyotaism?,' Work, Employment, and Society, 5(4), 1992: 567-600. The neo-Marxist perspective is represented by Pony Ilger and Chris Smith et.al., Global japanization? The Transnational Transformation of the Labour Process (London: Routledge, 1994). Influential American works relevant to the debate
included the already cited MIT study by Womack and Roos 1990; and M. Kenney and R. Florida, Beyond Mass Production: the Japanese System and its Transfer to the US   (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1993).[back to text]

[107] See also Graham 1988.[back to text]

[108] Interview from an Open University/British Broadcasting corporation productions documentary film titled, 'Strategies for Change.' The Task Force,' PT 61l: The Structure and Design of Manufacturing Systems (l986), quoted in Oliver and Wilkinson 1992: 91-2.[back to text]

[109] Bratton 1992: 188.[back to text]

[110] Ackroyd, Burrell, Hughes, and Whitaker l986: ll-23.[back to text]

[111] See the Introduction to Millward, Stevens, Smart, and
Hawes 1992.[back to text]

[112] Financial Times, 23 June 1987, quotation in Oliver and Wilkinson 1992: 286.[back to text]

[113] Financial Times, 6 September 1991, Ibid., p.287.[back to text]

[114] On the general concept of amae see, Takeo Doi, "Amae-a Key Concept for Understanding Japanese Personality Structure," in A.J. Smith and R.K. Beardsley et.al., Japanese Culture: Its Development and Characteristics (Chicago: Aldine, 1962) ; and on its significance in the workplace see, Takeshi Ishida, "Conflict and Its Accomodation: Omote - Ura and Uchi
- Soto Relations," in Krauss, Rohlen, and Steinhoff et.al., Conflict in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), pp.16-38.[back to text]

[115] For a descriptive account of the Japanese 'firm as community' space and the British labor/management segregated spaces see, Ronald Dore, British Factory Japanese Factory: the Origins of National Diversity in Industrial Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).[back to text]

[116] Elger and Smith 1994: 47.[back to text] [back to text]

[117] Michael White and Malcolm Trevor, Under Japanese Management: The Experience of British Workers (London: Heinemann, 1983), p.x-xi.[back to text]

[118] Ibid., pp.68-9.[back to text]

[119] Ibid., p.70.[back to text]

[120] A 1987 BBC interview quoted in Oliver and Wilkinson 1992: 228.[back to text]

[121] Ibid., p.153.[back to text]

[122] Bill Taylor, Tony Elger, and Peter Fairbrother, "Transplants and Emulators: The Fate of the Japanese Model in British Electronics," in Elger and Smith 1994: 123-51.[back to text]

[123] Bratton 1992: 103-30. Similar findings are evident in Elger and Smith 1994: 219-20.[back to text]

[124] Ibid., p.114.[back to text]

[125] Ibid., p.117.[back to text]

[126] Bratton 1992: 160-200.[back to text]

[127] Ibid., pp.l64-69.[back to text]

[128] Oliver and Wilkinson (1992) quoted a BBC interview with an employee at Lucas Electric in l986 who explained his new right in the 'kanban system' to stop the line by shouting 'Jidoka, ' 'so if we find we have a reject or bad component we don't just keep making it.' (BBC/OU 1986a), p.95.[back to text]

[129] Bratton l992: 171.[back to text]

[130] Ibid., p.185.[back to text]

[131] Ibid., pp.178-80.[back to text]

[132] Ibid., p.186.[back to text]

[133] Ibid., p.188.[back to text]

[134] Ibid., p.193.[back to text]

[135] Ibid., p.183.[back to text]

[136] Oliver and Wilkinson 1992: 146-7.[back to text]

[137] Thomas H. Johnson, Relevance Regained: From Top Down Control to Bottom-up Empowerment  (New York: Free Press, 1993), pp.44-5; see also Oliver and Wilkinson l992: 146; Locke 1989: 15-29.[back to text]

[138] Oliver and Wilkinson 1992: 149.[back to text]

[139] Ibid., pp.142-3.[back to text]

[140] These standards are listed in footnote 74.[back to text]

[141] See especially, M. Imai, Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success (New York: Random Mouse, 1986).[back to text]

[142] Robert E. Cole, Strategies For Learning: Small-Group Activities in American, Japanese, and Swedish Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, l989).[back to text]

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