Japanese Management

Before Japan's miracle economic growth faltered in the early 1990s, Japanese management fascinated the West. During the 1970s and 1980s, Japan's manufacturing industries redefined global expectations about high-performance high-reliability products, notably in motor vehicles and consumer electronics. Almost overnight, Japan had asserted itself as a technological and economic superpower. Its economic expansion seemed unstoppable. Many believed that it had invented a new and superior form of capitalism. However, Japan's miracle growth faltered, just as America's long economic boom started to raise renewed faith in American-style liberal individualism, coupled to fluid labor markets for specialists. Global interconnectedness helped to spread the American model of flexible, market-rational entrepreneurship based on efficient, impersonal transactions. Entrepreneurs in developing countries could use the Internet to facilitate their participation in the global market-place. Meanwhile, China presented the world with the biggest economic expansion in global history, reshaping the dynamics of international competition. New concerns about new patterns of global economic development eclipsed interest in Japanese management.

At the height of Japanese management's popularity, many imitators imagined that Japanese management could be reduced to universally applicable buzzwords. For example, the Japanese word kaizen (continuous improvement) became part of the management-speak lexicon in English-speaking countries. Applying kaizen to manufacturing, or any other form of collective activity, offered the allure of reproducing Japanese-style progress. Japan's Toyota Motor Corporation was seen as a paragon of perfection. Toyota was quick to realize that clogging-up the production process with things that were not being used did not make sense. It pioneered the use of signboards, or kamban, to manage the flow so that one got what one wanted when one needed it (just-in-time production); waste should be avoided (lean production) and people doing the job should contribute to discussions about improved quality (quality circles). Indeed, all employees should try to appreciate the way in which their contribution related to the total quality of what the organization, as a seamlessly integrated team, was trying to achieve (total quality management). Along with kaizen and kamban, five Japanese words beginning with the letter s were portrayed as the 5S model of Japanese management. Englishspeaking enthusiasts were quick to preserve the power of the alliteration, matching the 5S model with English edicts that began with s. Hence, people were required to sort and scrap (seiri), straighten and store (seiton), scrub and shine (seisô), standardize in a clean and neat manner (seiketsu), and sustain discipline (shitsuke).

Even after Japanese management ceased to be seen as a silver bullet, the idea of learning from Japan received a new lease on life with the publication of [Page 732]The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, by two Japanese academics, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi in 1995. According to Nonaka and Takeuchi's model, tacit knowledge in the heads of employees could be converted into explicit knowledge that anyone could understand. This concept of tacit-explicit knowledge-conversion fueled the Western fashion for knowledge management, or KM, whereby the tacit dimension of personal knowledge is converted into explicit knowledge and managed.

Yet, not everyone subscribes to the view that Japanese management is a transferable commodity that can be captured in universally comprehensible words or initials (such as kaizen, the 5S model, or explicit knowledge) and used anywhere. An alternative view follows from the idea that the meaning of words depends on how they are used by specific people in specific contexts. Accordingly, appreciating the concepts that underpin Japanese management depends on appreciating how Japanese insiders use the terms. Such a perspective highlights the importance of the institutional processes that enable Japanese organizations to operate as tightly bounded, close-knit communities. Power, mediated by close community relationships among organizational insiders, underpins modes of communication and control that are often overlooked in Western management models according to Tim Ray and Stewart Clegg.

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