Chapter II

' Models '

Labour in control

  As Britain's postwar productivity slide accelerated and the number of strikes increased during the 1950s and early 1960s, foreign models looked appealing to conservative government officials and industrialists concerned with an increasingly dysfunctional form of industrial relations.   Conservatives would have to wait, however, until organized labor loosened its influence over the workplace and in Parliament.
  During the Second World War, unions had made concessions for the sake of the common war effort, but in the final year of the war they resumed strikes' This traditional tone of mistrust of management helped shape postwar legislation. The first move the majority Labour Party made was to repeal the Trade Disputes Act of 1927, thereby reinstating the 1907 statute which protected unions from any libel suit in case of a firm's losses resulting from the informal or formal strike.[40]
  After the passage of this legislation, union membership nearly doubled from inter-war levels and the number of hours lost to strikes skyrocketed. By 1955, the number of working days lost to strikes was at 3,781 million (greater than at any time since 1932); by 1968, it was up to 4,690 million days; and by l970 the number of days lost had grown to 10,980 million.[41]  Throughout the 1970s, the number of days lost per thousand workers to strikes in Britain remained substantially higher than its competitors: America, France, Germany, and Japan.[42]
  Exemplifying labor's grip on management (or management's incapacity to manage) , wage increases resulting from strikes ran at an average annual rate of 12%, while prices went up 6% annually, and productivity increases remained less than 2%.[43] These statistics, intrinsic to
the diagnosis of the disease as well, moved Britain further toward identifying and emulating models from America and Japan, the countries which had surpassed its industrial productivity.
  One should pause, however, on the subject of models because, unless they come packaged in a kit with numbered parts, they are an illusory phenomena dependent on the originator's projected world image and the related needs of the beholder. The roots of any perceived model whether religious or economic, have unique political, economic, social, and environmental roots,. only later are they cut and transplanted into a foreign environment by someone with particular socio-economic or other needs. These needs determine the way the model is envisioned, transplanted and adapted over time in the new environment. Britain's choice and application of American and Japanese models reflected its underlying political motives and popular perceptions.

The American Model

Pre Second World War origins

  In America, with more open space, natural resources and diverse peoples, industry spread out and required combinations of communications, transportation and management structures on a scale and scope much greater than its British antecedent. The multitude of languages spoken by the employees of the early factories in the American Great Lakes region during the early 1900s alone required a much more carefully managed division of labor and production
to be controlled by ownership.[44]
  By the late 1920s, jherican universities laid a foundation for what would become the American corporate management model, built on the ideas of Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan (president of General Motors) , and Fredrick Winslow Taylor, originator of scientific management.[45] 'Fordism, ' or 'Taylorism,' as it came to be called, expanded on British classical economic theories of the need to manage the 'factors' of production by further standardizing labor through the calculations of a new 'white collar' class of  professionally trained managers.'  The term white collar actually came into use during the First world War, when expansive wartime production required an elite cadre of managers to standardize products and production
processes.[46]  American victory in the First World War added fuel to the Progressive and efficiency movements to develop what would become known as American managerialism.
  In expanding mass-production factories in America, scientific managers followed the lead of Taylor and made the old British craft-based piece-rate payment structure contingent on their formulations of the 'best way to work,' based on 'time and motion' studies of worker efficiency.[47]  Caught up in the Progressivism of the era, Ford and Taylor believed that a neutral class of professionally trained managers and administrators could produce a more harmonious
and democratic work environment and society. Certainly, the efficiency improvements in production made chemical, electrical, and automotive products more affordable to the masses, and in that sense, it made consumer buying power more democratic. In the workplace, however, the standardization of work by an exclusive class of professional managers made work more restrictive and employment security more precarious. Taylor's view that the average worker was not dependable unless 'driven' by management to be efficient was nothing new, and neither was
the defensive response of organized labor to defend the jobs and wages of American's multi-ethnic production line workers.
  The scientific management movement was pervasive during the inter-war years and even affected the expanding American mass-education system by consolidating schools for the 'most
efficient' methods of administration and teaching.  A class of professional administrators and counsellors now guided students into the most efficient track for their pretested intellectual capacities. Thus in America, as in Britain, schools both reflected and helped reinforce the social-technology management arrangements in the workplace.
  America's growing world image began making impressions during the early 1920s. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Vladamir Lenin (1917-1924) even appropriated Taylorism to
train an elite managerial class to centrally direct every area of production.[48] The American and Soviet experiences evolved into different models, but they shared the same philosophy that professional managers were necessary to control the comon worker.
  Before the Second World War, as America assumed Britain's mantle as Workshop of the World, British industrialists gradually acknowledged the superiority of American production methods. Even Quaker employers such as Edward Cadbury and Seebohm Rowntree, who had earlier advocated worker councils and in-company training programs for more humane conditions were, by late 1920s, advocating Fordist/Taylorist methods.[49] Fordism received mixed reviews in the wake of Henry Ford's blatant antisemitism and the Great Depression, but after the war, a recovering Europe supported by American Marshall Aid money continued adapting the American Fordist/Taylorist model.[50]

Post Second World War projection

In the postwar period, America's boom economy and a diminished role for labor in the anti-union climate of McCarthyism helped further refine and project American management models for modernization to the developing world. Everything from business management and urban planning in the War on Poverty, to foreign aid packages used Fordist/Taylorist planning methods which had by now incorporated new tools like 'Operational Research' (O.R.) ,  complex planning formulas using algorithms and calculus.
  President Kennedy applied the methods to the Vietnam War by hiring Robert McNamara of the Ford Motor Company and other experts in O.R. from the Rand Corporation to solve sophisticated military operations problems.[51]  Another close advisor to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Walt Whitman Rostow, articulated the American model for the
developing world by proposing the 'stages' it would pass through to 'take-off' into modernization.[52]  The Soviet Union countered Rostow with its own (then successful)
adaption of Taylorism. Thus, lit up by the Cold War struggle for global influence, America and the Soviet Union projected images of their respective models throughout the world, and at home, reinforced related institutions to preserve their nations' central status in their respective world economies.
  In light of Aherica's postwar economic boom and Britain's sluggish economy, Conservative British and American officials in 1948 initiated a project to bring the American 'productivity model' to Britain. This project, called the Anglo-American Council on Productivity, was funded in part by the massive financial aid umbrella of the Marshall Plan and continued from 1948 to 1952. Writing in 1953, the British economist Graham Mutton referred to the project of regular teams of managers, workers, and specialists sent to America, and the flood of reports published and distributed throughout Britain, as an endeavor 'the likes of which, on such a scale and of such practical value, has never been seen in the history of international and cultural borrowing.[53]  This appraisal turned out to be overly optimistic, however. Labor reacted defensively to its low representation on the teams, and to the apparent political motive of the teams to temper Britain's Comunist-leaning union leaders.[54]
  Decades after the productivity teams, Alfred Chandler echoed the basic argument that Conservative British diagnosticians of the disease used into the 1980s:

British entrepreneurs failed to make the essential
three-pronged investment in manufacturing,
marketing, and management in a number of the
capital-intensive industries of the Second
Industrial Revolution. If they did so, their
investments in production were usually large
enough to benefit from economies of scale and
scope but often not large enough to utilize their
full potential.[55]

Chandler argued that British enterprise still operated under an 'invisible hand' (laissez faire) framework of 'personal capitalism, ' i.e. small-scale family-owned corporations,' and
needed to begin to use the 'visible hand' of trained management hierarchies.[56]  Of course Britain did not have the vast expanses of land, resources, and ethnicity which naturally required such an infrastructure and system of management in America, but these factors were overlooked when models appeared to provide easy answers to deep-seated socio-economic questions.
  It would be some time before the American management model began to make a dent in the traditional bias against business studies. Labor remained generally suspicious over any 'Americanized' management initiatives. The Labour party also controlled the government during the imediate decades of the postwar period and favored a more centralized, if not Soviet-inspired model for economic development. Against the prevailing trends, in 1967, Conservatives finally established the first business schools at Manchester and London. In 1977, Alistair Mant described the sense of desperation and euphoria with which Conservatives greeted
the American model:

When the remarkable acceleration of management
educational provisions took place . . . in the
1960s the American model was again, largely
without criticism, accepted as gospel. The main
protagonists at that growth now wryly admit that
the American example may have been followed too
slavishly but few can sugaest convincing
alternative ideas either.[57]

The 'alternative ideas' were being formulated in Japan and Germany, two countries which had not chosen to emulate the mainstream American management (or management education)
models. Although both the German and Japanese alternatives were important to the developing postwar world economy, it was Japan's that eventually appealed to Britain as endemic strikes, unemployment, and inflation reached crisis levels in the early 1980s.

The Japanese Model

American and British 'secrets'

Interestingly, Japan chose to adapt some British and American classified wartime military production 'secrets' which had been used to defeat them. The secrets were openly known before the war and originated in America's Bell Laboratories in the 1930s to insure the highest quality
standards for the first mass-production of telephones. A review of these early developments is essential to understanding the West's interpretation of the Japanese model after Japan's rise in the post Second World War economy.
  Instead of focusing on maximizing worker output as in most Fordist/Taylorist factories during the 1930s, Bell Labs, especially at the Hawthorne plant, made workers comfortable and kept their production tasks diverse to break up traditional monotony which normally led to defects. A
researcher named Walter Shewart developed statistical sampling techniques to monitor the production process at each stage of production to improve upon the typical quality control methods of culling defects at the end of the production line. Researchers even entrusted workers with authority to monitor their own quality. In Britain, sir Ronald Fisher developed similar methods in conducting agricultural research. These experimental American and British production methods turned out to be highly efficient under controllable circumstances, but they were fundamentally different from what was being done in mainstream mass production because they potentially eliminated the need for management by entrusting managerial authority to workers on the production line.
  An Aherican named W. Edwards Deming, a trained physicist, studied under Shewart at Bell Labs, as well as under Fisher in an agricultural research firm in London.  Deming was able to integrate the work of these men into a coherent system of statistical analysis called 'Statistical
Process Control' (SPC) which he used to conduct the first accurate united States census before the Second World War.  During the war, the United States Department of War put Deming in the ranks of the select group of military production managers, the 'Whiz Kids, ' which included W.
Allen Wallis, Milton Friedman, and Robert. S. McNamara to handle the massive logistic operations of the two front war.  Deming designed a series of travelling seminars to teach
thousands of workers and engineers across the country his SPC methods of quality management.[58]
  Military production demands did not allow the time or the resources for managerial time-motion formulations, defect quotas and prefigured buffer-stocks, so the Fordist/Taylorist methods had to be replaced with a more flexible, quality-assured system. Ironically, Japan would adapt the SPC methods to their own management methods into what would come to be called 'total quality management' (TQM) and 'just-in-time' (JIT) production. George Cyril
Allen's comments are revealing of how such a rethinking of the predominant Fordist/Taylorist system was possible in America and Britain during the war but impossible afterward:

Only during the Second World War in the face of
common enemy was cooperation wholehearted and
widespread. Then the British enjoyed the same
unity that the defeated nations found in their
task of recovery from the ruins of war' One is
thus led back to institutions, attitudes and the
challenges presented to societies, in order to
explain these contrasts.[59]

Ishikawa Kaoru, a leading Japanese consultant on TQM and JIT, contended in the early 1980s that these methods may have even been an important part of the Allied war victory:

America [and Britain's] wartime production was
quantitatively, qualitatively, and economically
very satisfactory, owing in part to the
introduction of statistical quality control, which
also stimulated technological advances. One might
even speculate that the Second World War was won
by quality control and by the utilization of
modern statistics. certain statistical methods
researched and utilized by the [A]llied powers
were so effective that they were classified as
military secrets until the surrender of Nazi
Germany.[60]

  In America's postwar boom economy, Fordist/Taylorist methods, supported by their related prewar infrastructure and education system, etc., resumed and the West lost interest in SPC. Deming took his lessons to Japan, where he helped conduct a population census for the Supreme Comander of Allied Powers (SCAP). During that project, he earned the respect of a number of prominent leaders in industry,' and as a result, they invited him back in 1950 to give a series of
lectures on SPC to the Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) , the premier organization of industrial engineers and managers in the postwar period.[61]
  In 1951, to show their appreciation for Deming, who had refused the royalties from the copies of his 1950 SPC lectures, the JUSE created a quality award they called the Deming Prize.[62] This prestigious award, and the related quality control consulting and auditing services provided by the JUSE, enabled Japanese companies like Toyota Motors, Bridgestone, Ricoh, Toshiba, and Matsushita to share information on quality control methods and build on each others innovations. Deming provides part of the key to understanding the formulation of the Japanese model as the
West came to perceive it, but the transformation of SPC into TQM/JIT production was complex. The Japanese model, like the American model, was appropriated in a simplified form, but it involved numerous social, political-economic, institutional, and environmental determinants.

Factors in the transformation

It is not within the scope of the thesis to delve into the intellectual history of early modern Japan, but it is no less significant than Britain's laissez faire counterpart in the Anglo-American tradition and should therefore be considered briefly.  During the late-eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, Japan, like Britain, had its share of political-economists writing in response to the challenges of an expanding economy. In Japan, as in Britain, the merchant class was upwardly mobile and influential, but it often became more of a target of blame for the increasingly bankrupt ruling military (samurai) class and the increasingly famine-stricken farmers, on whose rice production the whole economy depended. Being ranked lowest
on the traditional Confucian moral/social scale, it was easy for the merchant and banking houses to be blamed for economic hardship; and it is not surprising, then, that political-economic discourse was often centered on the moral and social utility of financial transactions.  Political-
economy (keisei saimin) , the root of the modern Japanese term for economics, keizai, actually translates "ordering the world and saving the people," according to Tetsuo Najita, a leading historian of the early-modern period.[63]
  In Osaka, the business and banking capital of Japan during the Tokugawa period, there even existed a merchant academy (kaitokudo) in which bankers and businessmen wrote political-economic treatises and formulated policy to deal with the bankrupt ruling class and the impoverished (and rebellious) farmers. It was there that two prominent bankers, Yamagata Banto (1748-1821) and Kusama Naokata (1753-183l) wrote their treatises and defined capital as a
"social property" to be kept in circulation for the benefit of the public rather than amassed for private gain.[64]  The discourse materialized in the form of precise methods of  calculating the social utility of financial transactions. A wide range of organizations, from banking houses to networks of cooperatives, employed such methods of calculation.[65]  These methods and the discourse enveloping them would influence the adaption of European models and direct Japanese conceptions of industrial relations in the firm which, by the late twentieth century, the West would identify as the Japanese model.[66]
  By the late Meiji and early Taisho period (1910s), elements of the model began to take shape. Employers had already begun delegating managerial authority to workers' groups and engineers on the production line.[67]  And in contrast to Britain, university trained engineers played an
important role in upper-level management as well.[68]  Moreover, non-union and union represented employees (the latter making up only 10% of workers in the 1920s) were concerned with equalizing status in the workplace as well as better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits.[69]
  Union organization based on Western models was soon molded by traditional forces.   Whereas the British government stayed out of the business of industrial relations altogether, except to guarantee labor's right to strike and bargain freely with management, the Japanese government and officially-sponsored agencies like the Harmonization Society (Kyouchokai) and the Great Japan National Essence (Dai Nihon Kokusuikai) , as well as prefectura1 police, encouraged firm-based mediation between labor and business interests.[70] After the Arbitration Law of 1926, police mediation acquired legal backing.
  Under the pressure of the demands of such outside groups and of labor itself, employers had a 'benevolence movement' of their own during the 1920s, which helped establish company insurance and savings plans. But the biggest compromises between labor and management came about under the influence of the Industrial Service to the Nation (Sangyohokoku, or SANPO) movement to mobilize the nation for war. It was during this crucial period, according to Andrew
Gordon, that the features of the 'Japanese employment system, ' i.e., lifetime employment, seniority pay, and enterprise unions, and factory councils formed which would correspond so well with the postwar diffused methods of SPC (Statistical Process Control).[71]
  Postwar reforms under S.C.A.P. , like legalizing unions, breaking up traditional monopolies (ziibaiBiu) , and shaking down the elite industrial leadership (thereby making room for mid-level engineer managers) , helped further level the playing field and enable a successful transformation of SPC into TQM/JIT (Total Quality Management/Just In Time). Besides Ishikawa Kaoru, other prominent engineers (soon to be known internationally) rose to
leadership positions and influenced the adaption of SPC.  Shingo shigeo, a mechanical engineer at Toyota and Mitsubishi shipbuilding formulated the 'zero defects, ' or poka yoke aspect of TQM. Taguchi Geniichi, a statistician who worked in the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, formulated the 'Quadratic Loss Function, ' a method of calculating the 'multiplier effect' of minute quality losses along the entire line of production.[72]
  The Occupation reforms also helped further synthesize the education system by extending compulsory comprehensive lower-secondary education from six to nine years, and abolishing the elite higher schools which had until then been the prep-schools for the Imperial Universities. The
extension of lower-secondary education and its reformed pedagogy also synchretized with the full participation demands of SPC. Because Japan never developed professional managers through business schools, their public schools became more significant to the development the Japanese 'firm as comunity' and will be compared to its British counterpart in chapter four.

1979--projection of the Japanese model

  Of all the factors contributing to the TQM/JIT model in Japan, the West identified Deming as a principle vehicle for projecting the image of the Japanese world-wide in the 1980s and early 1990s. It is intriguing, however, that Deming was not recognized for his contribution in the postwar scholarship on Japanese management and economic development. All of the pro-1979 works on Japanese management and economics emphasized the broader, cultural and historical
nature of Japanese management: 'Tokugawa religion' (Bellah, 1957) ; 'the Tokugawa heritage, ' 'the century of modernization, I 'prewar ideologies, ' (Yoshino, l968) ; national economic policies and company-specific practices (Abegglen, 1958; Cole, 1971; Vogel et.al., 1975),' and 'late development' of 'social technology-education systems' (Dore, 1973).[73] Donald Gordon's (1988) study of the postwar (1945-1977) literature concluded that the scholarship was caught up in the 'modernization' propaganda aimed at making Japan out as a 'bastion against communism.' [74]   Although Deming might appear to have been functional to the politics of the times in that he was 'the American who provided the know-how' to a developing nation, on closer consideration,
he and his SPC theories, having been passed-by in America after the war, were still too far out of the mainstream discourse to support the American Rostowian 'take-off' theories of the l960s and 1970s. His ideas were opposed to the premises of the American managerialism that credentialed managers were the most capable ones to quantify and control the 'factors' of production.
  This is not to say that these reputable scholars advocated modernization theories per se, but they were at least responding to the intellectual cross-fire of the Cold War in which the United States and the Soviet Union pitched their developmental models to the various 'third world'
countries participating in their respective world economies. Scholars had to at least take these theories into account, and they often framed their work to respond to the mainstream views.[75] The Japanese transformation of SPC into TQM took decades, and it could not begin to make waves until Japan posed a clear threat to American industry.
  That prospect arose after the global oil crisis of the 1970s when Japan continued to adapt remarkably to scarce resources using the continuous improvement and flexibility premises of TQM/JIT' Japan's continued success in capturing world markets for autos, electronics, etc' , despite the oil crisis prompted many American executives to visit Japanese production facilities personally,. and finally, an NBC White Paper documentary titled "If Japan Can Do it why Can't We" 'discovered' Deming, the American who had already received 1960 the highest honors given to ever given to a foreigner and had his portrait displayed prominently in the lobby of Toyota's main office next to the founder and chairman's portraits.[76]
  Under the influence of this media-generated popularization of the Japanese model, the views of scholars of Japanese economic and social organization began to shift.   One of these scholars, Ezra Vogel who 'had not yet questioned the general superiority of American society and
institutions' in the 1960s, by 1979 had published Japan as Number One, an uncritical affirmation of Japan's modern institutions as a 'new mirror' for America.[77]   Similarly, Ronald Dore was pessimistic in the early 1970s that Japanese methods could constitute an acceptable model for Britain:

What chance is there that the two systems, the
formal [British--union directed] and the informal
[Japanese--shop floor directed] will merge to
produce a Japanese type structure--the present
combine committee, elected from the bottom-up,
becoming the effective negotiating body with its
own full'time officials, . . . Hardly any chance,
is the obvious answer for anyone who knows
anything of the institutional inertia of the trade
union movement. And if the unions are unlikely to
change themselves, it is hard to see who can
change them. The law can dictate the structure of
voluntary associations in Ghana under Nkumah or in
the imediate aftermath of war in Germany, but
hardly in peacetime, in a country with Britain's
entrenched traditions of voluntarism even if there
were total consensus among politicians as to
what was desirable.[78]

By 1987, Dore had written a book of Japanese 'recipes' for Britain, not dissimilar to Vogel's.[79] Vogel and Dore could not have anticipated the West's further slide economically, and the intensification of related industrial relations ills, especially in Britain. Nor could they have anticipated the overwhelming influence that industrial and official leadership would provide in identifying and facilitating the new model.
  Deming became a projector of the Japanese model because it was his formulation that made the first impact on America, which reflected to Britain and Europe, and even back to Japan. Deming brought a technical rationale for native Japanese concepts like kaizen (Continuous improvement), kanban (a part of Just-In-Time production), and ringisei (a tool of consensus-building in TQM). Yoshino (1968), and Rohlen (1974,. 1975) had written about ringisei and the significance of work-group operations, but they did not link it to the scientific quality/efficiency premises of SPC.
  America's rediscovery of Deming and his articulation of Japanese management, moreover, exemplified an appropriation process in world history whereby societies peripheral to a
dominant culture use native referents to describe and transform the foreign image into their own tradition.  In 1981 for example, after Deming (then a feisty eighty-year old) had offended Ford Motor Company executives with his infamous tirade against American managerialism, Ford went to a Japanese source, Ishikawa Kaoru, the best known Japanese TQM/JIT consultant. But Ford quickly abandoned the idea, according to the vice president of manufacturing, William I.
Scollard, because Ishikawa's lectures were too difficult and management was 'sick of hearing about Japan.'  Scollard concluded that Deming was abrasive but 'at least he was American.'[80] Deming's simple presentation style and his use of Christian and English literary referents reconstituted the Japanese model for Western ears. While he castigated the historical premises of the American Fordist/Taylorist system as 'the Deadly Diseases of Western Management, ' in his lectures and books, he prefaced introductions to parts of the new model in his book and
lectures with lines from Job, Hosea, Icclesiastes, Psalms, Proverbs, Shakespeare, and Chaucer.[81]
  His 'Deadly Diseases of Western Management, ' could also be viewed as a corollary to the British disease in that he condemned the traditional demarcations between labor and management and their lack of 'constancy of purpose' or 'raison d'etre' to unify all employees. Deming maintained that short-term goals and profits based on Western-style accounting methods were 'deadly' to the long-term well-being of the firm. He proposed that the Japanese model of 'life-long comitment' to employment for the regular workers was more efficient in the long run because it enabled workers to make fullest use of SPC to self-manage for continuous
improvement without fear of losing their jobs.[82] The biggest 'disease' of all, Deming maintained, was the profession of management itself, which because of its assumption regarding the need to manage, or control labor, could never respond adequately to the post-industrial world economy. Through his daily statistical experiments, performed on stage during his four-day seminars, he tried to refute the Fordist/Taylorist (and British) notions that labor needed to be managed as a mere factor of production. His experiments demonstrated that individual differences among hourly workers could not be blamed for more than fifteen percent of defects, while at least eighty-five percent of defects could only be attributed to variations in the processes of production, controllable through SPC tools.  Deming was so adamant against a profession of management, he purposely avoided organizing a school for the model in favor of keeping in touch personally with a select group of 'disciple' accountants whom he personally discharged to companies who had proven their comitment to his principles.  The closest he came to a literal formulation of the Japanese model was his Fourteen Points (appendix, pp.13l-132).
  A variety of governmental and state agencies in the United States, Great Britain, and the European Comunity, along with numerous multinational companies based in western countries took heed of Deming and his Japanese cohorts.  They established standards and awards based on Japan's coveted Deming Award and the principles of other Japanese quality gurus.[83]  Since the establishment of the awards, a number of U.S. firms, including IBM and Xerox won the American equivalent of the Deming prize, the Baldridge Prize. These participating companies subsequently required that all of their affiliates and suppliers become members of the prize applicant group as well. Even the U-S. Department of  Defence hired 'Deming Masters' and 'Quality gurus' to help revamp its procurement system and reform its supplier network.[84] In 1989, Florida Power and Light (a utility company based in Miami) became the first U.S. company to win the Deming Award in Japan after completing nearly ten years of Japanese management applications under the direction of Asaka Tetsuichi, emeritus professor at Tokyo University and senior auditor for the JUSE (Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers.[85]
  Thus, beginning in 1979, America helped identify and project the Japanese model largely through W. Edwards Deming.  In Britain, Deming was an important part of the defining process of the Japanese model, but since organized labor had already become suspicious over the American productivity model, a more firmly Japan-rooted description of the model was preferable. Since the mid-l980s, harkening 'Japanization' had become a comon means of appropriating parts of the Japanese model in Britain, and it is this subject of debate to which the thesis now turns.

[40] Tominson 1972: 197.[back to text]

[41] Ibid.,  pp.210-21.[back to text]

[42] Between 1972 and 1981, the average number of days lost per year per thousand workers were: Britain, 531; United States, 382,' France, 187; Germany, 31,' Japan, 96. Source: Yearbook of Labour Statistics, cited in Michael Poole, Industrial Relations: Origins and Patterns of National Diversity (London: Routledge, 1986) , pp.129-30.[back to text]

[43] Tominson 1972: 224.[back to text]

[44] This information comes from a 1915 survey of workers in the Highland Park area of Detroit, Michigan cited in Womack, Jones, and Boos 1990: 31.[back to text]

[45] Fredrick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) worked his way up in the Bethlehem Steel Company from apprentice to foreman and chief engineer. His relentless pursuit of efficiency in all aspects of production culminated in Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911). Biographical information summarized in Edward Byre Hunt et.al, Scientific Management Since Taylor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1924) , pp.7-9.[back to text]

[46] S. Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1964), p.l17.[back to text]

[47] Frank B. and Lillian Gilbreth, disciples of Taylor, helped popularize the motion analysis of work using moving pictures. Haber 1964: 37-41.[back to text]

[48] Haber, 1964: 129; 151-52.[back to text]

[49] John Child, British Management Thought: A Critical Analysis (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. , 1969) , pp.74-5.[back to text]

[50] see Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science   (Manchester, 1987).[back to text]

[51] These developments are reviewed extensively in a chapter titled, "The new paradigm revisited." Locke 1989: 30-44.[back to text]

[52] Walt Whitman Rostow (19l1-  ), nicknamed the 'hawk-eyed optimist' in the 1960s, was at the center of U.S. foreign economic development policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations between 1961 and 1969. His optimism resided in the 'modernization' theory in which his own 'five stages' of economic development and 'take-off' theory was the centerpiece, Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, Magnus Magnusson, CBI, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. , 1990); Who's Who (New York: A. and C. Black, 1983); see also, Rostow, The Process of Economic Growth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960); Politics and the Stages of Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1971).[back to text]

[53] Graham Mutton, We Too Can Prosper (London: Allen and Unwin, l953), pp.233-4, cited in Carew 1987: 137.[back to text]

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

[55] Alfred Chandler Jr. , Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of  Industrial Capitalism (Boston: Harvard U.P., 1990) , p.235.[back to text]

[56] Ibid., pp.235-52; see also, Chandler 1977.[back to text]

[57] Mant 1977: 43.[back to text]

[58] W. Allen Wallis recounts the workings of this group of statisticians, including a letter from Deming, in "Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945," in Journal of the American Statistical Association (June 1980, pp.320-1), cited in Andrea Gabor, The Man Who Discovered Quality: How W. Edwards Deming Brought the Quality Revolution to America -- the stories of Ford, Xerox, and GM (New York: Peng"uin, 1990), pp.54-5.[back to text]

[59] Allen l976: 66.[back to text]

[60] In the U.S. the 'secrets' were referred to as the Z-1 standards,. in Britain, the British Standards 1008' Cited in Ishikawa Kaoru, What is Total Quality Control: The Japanese Way (translation of  "TCQ towa Nanika--Nipponteki Hinshitsu Kanri", JUSE Press, 1981)    (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1985), p.14. The late Ishikawa (died l989) was a
trained chemist and wartime productions designer.' After the war, he continued research and study in statistics at the university of Tokyo and became one of the leading members of
the JUSE in 1949. He was director of the Chemical Society of  Japan in 1952 and continued to teach seminars and organize journals for the budding 'Quality Circle' QC movement in the
late 1950s and l960s' He also served on the Japan Standards Organization and the International Standards Organization in the 1970s and 1980s. In the West, he (among others) became
well known among industries adapting the Japanese 'model' and his name came to designate a method of quality control analysis (the Ishikawa diagram).[back to text]

[61] Deming's background growing up on the American frontier in Wyoming, having to support his mother and baby brother by hauling firewood for the town while simultaneously pursuing his studies, reads like the life of Ninomiya Sontoku (l787-1856) , the prewar moral education enshrined founder of the Cooperative (Mujin) movement in the early nineteenth century who was always illustrated carrying firewood as he read a book. Deming's SPC methods of management as well were cooperative based. According to his biographer, Andrea Gabor, Deming also had a strong affinity with the Japanese during his first time there conducting the census. He regularly visited the Kabuki theater even though it was off-limits to the military, and his census work took him all over the country.  He said what impressed him most about the Japanese was their spirit of optimism in the face of devastation. Gabor 1990.[back to text]

[62] 'Notes from JUSE,' Ibid., pp.7l-3.[back to text]

[63] Lecture notes from seminar on early-modern Japan by Tetsuo Najita Spring 1994 University of Hawaii.[back to text]

[64] For analysis of these and other contributors to the "merchant epistemology, " see Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: the Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of Osaka
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), especially pp.222-84.[back to text]

[65] Najita, lecture notes.[back to text]

[66] Ibid.[back to text]

[67] Andrew Gordon, "Contests For the Workplace" in Postwar Japan as History (Princeton: princeton u.p. , 1993) , p.378,. see also by the same author, The Evolution of Labor Relations: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955 (Cambridge: Harvard U.P. , 1985).[back to text]

[68] Nakagawa Keiichiro, "The 'Learning Industrial Revolution' in Management," in Japanese Management in Historical Perspective: The International Conference on Business History Proceedings at the Fuji Conference (Tokyo : University of Tokyo Press, 1989), 17-20; see also, Yasumuro Kenichi "Engineers as in Japanese Industrialization," (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1993), pp.76-l01.[back to text]

[69] For demands for more equal status before the war, see Thomas C. Smith "The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers (1890-1920) ," in Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization 1750-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 236-270. For after the war, see Gordon 1993: 379.[back to text]

[70] Richard H. Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1976), p.28.[back to text]

[71] Gordon 1985: 261-62.[back to text]

[72] There is even a Taguchi club (est.1987) in the United Kingdom, according to Lesley and Malcolm Munro-Faure, Implementing Total Quality Management (London: Pitman, 1992),
pp.295-8.[back to text]

[73] Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957), M.Y. Yoshino Japan's Managerial System: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); James Abegglen, The Japanese Factory (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958); Robert E. Cole Japanese Blue Collar: The Changing Tradition (Berkeley: University of California press, 1971);  Ezra Vogel et.al. Modern Japanese Organization and Decision-Making (Berkeley: University of California, 1974); Ronald Dore British Factory--Japanese Factory: The Origins of National Diversity in Industrial Relations (Berkeley: University of California press, 1973).[back to text]

[74] Donald Duncan Gordon, Japanese Management in America and Britain: Revelation or Requiem for Western Industrial Democracy? (Aldershot: Avebury, 1988) , pp.43-84.[back to text]

[75] see the Introduction to J.W. Bower, et.al., Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (New York: Pantheon, 1975); and the Preface to the second edition of R.P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1985 [1965]).[back to text]

[76] In 1960, Deming became one of the first Americans to receive the Second Class Sacred Treasure, a medal bestowed by Emperor Hirohito (Gabor l990: 73). Deming's portrait is even bigger than the other two pictures, according to Rafael Aguayo, Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality (New York: Carol Publishing, 1990).[back to text]

[77] EzraVogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1979), p.viii.[back to text]

[78] Dore 1973: 342-3.[back to text]

[79] Ronald Dore, Taking Japan Seriously: A Confucian Perspective on Leading Economic Issues(London: Athone Press, 1988).[back to text]

[80] Interview with William I. Scollard, by Andrea Gabor 1990: 126.[back to text]

[81] W.Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982).[back to text]

[82] Ibid., see especially the chapter 'Diseases and Obstacles, ' pp.97-148.[back to text]

[83] In America: 1) the NASA award (est. 1985) promotes innovation of in-process quality control and worker participation in management; 2) the Shingo prize (est. l988 at Utah State University partners' program) promotes the teachings of Shigeo shingo, president of Japan's Institute of Management Improvement and co-developer of the Toyota Production system,. 3) the Baldridge Award (est. 1987 by Congressional Bill promoted by the then Secretary of Commerce, Malcom Baldridge) , promotes higher standards of quality and participation. In the European Community (including Britain): 1) the ISO 9000 Standards (est. l987) promoting world affiliation with Baldridge members and quality standards (the British equivalent is the British Standard BSS750,' and 2) 'The All European Quality Award (TEQA) (est. l991 in the Netherlands) promotes TQM customer and employee satisfaction.   See Francis I. Mahoney and Carl G. Thor, The TQM Trilogy: Using ISO 9000, the Deming Prize, and the Baldridge Award to Establish a System for Total Quality Management (New York: American Management Association, 1994), pp.12-3; 211-16. [back to text]