Japanese interfirm networks: exploring the seminal sources of their success

Article Abstract:

An extensive body of literature explains features of the highly cooperative relationship between Japanese firms, particularly Toyota, and their supplier-firm network. The literature does not explore when these networks emerged or the factors conducive to their emergence. This paper uses transaction cost analysis and game theory to address these issues. It indicates that the networks emerged in the 1950s, and that the initiating factors were exogenous to the networks, centring on the unusual business environment that then prevailed in Japan. The analysis indicates why firms like Toyota gained an advantage over competitors in America. They were relieved of two major transaction costs: those linked to internationalization and decomposed subcontracting. In addition, successful networks developed intragroup understandings that led to significant reductions in both interfirm co-ordination costs and direct production costs per unit of output. The paper questions the extent to which Toyota-type networks are prevalent in Japan. It questions the advantage that firms in America or elsewhere (even Japan) can gain from emulating Toyota practices such as unguarded subcontracting. It offers a different interpretation to standard business practices in firms like Toyota, such as relational contracting. It provides a basis for a reinterpretation of Japanese business history and the role of 'Japan Inc.' (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Japan, Social networks, Interorganizational relations

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Japanese and British Managerial Colleagues - How They View Each Other

Article Abstract:

Mutual perceptions of more than one hundred Japanese and one hundred British managers working in London for some eighteen different Japanese firms included autostereotypes, heterostereotypes and metastereotypes. The relationship between the autostereotype of each group and the heterosteroetupe of it by another group is examined, as are metastereotypes acuracy. Eighteen semantic items can be formed into three main factors which, when subjected to rotation can be intepreted as approval, open-style, and functional. Questionnaires were administered in native languages. Japanese managers viewed themselves as neither very shy nor very assertive. Using split-halves analysis, the three factors proved inconsistant and had low comparability coeffieients. Tables show data on loadings of varimax rotated components. In a study much the same as this one of expatriate and local management in Singapore, correspondence was located between two major components and functional and open style elements. Substantial status differential existed between the British and Japanese managers.

Management, Surveys, Executives, Discriminant analysis, Employee orientation, Factor Analysis

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The impact of ownership and capital structure on managerial motivation and strategy in management buy-outs: a cultural analysis

Article Abstract:

This study examines, from a cultural perspective, owner-managers' and other stakeholders' interpretations of the partial fusion of ownership and control through high leverage in eigth UK management buy-outs (MBOs). Owner-control and debt-control are interpreted as having positive effects on managerial motivation, organizational decision-making processes and implementation of cost reduction strategies and negative ones on fundamental changes in strategy and acquisition. These interpretations accord broadly with agency thoery propositions but show that owner-managers place less emphasis on wealth incentive effects and more emphasis on the enabling and facilitating roles of collective ownership and the freedom it gives from inappropriate corporate control. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Analysis, Employee motivation, Management buyouts, Agency theory

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