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Makoto Ohtsu with Tomio Imanari, inside Japanese business: A narrative history, 1960-2000, M.E. Sharpe, 2002.
Until the burst of the bubble economy in 1990, Japanese management practices were highly acclaimed and many people proclaimed that Japanese firms will continue to dominate various industry sectors in the global marketplace. A large number of journal articles and books were published attempting to support these claims in the 1980s. However, in the 1990s when the Japanese economy continued to slide and the once-acclaimed Japanese firms suffered from declining competitiveness, we began to see a large number of articles and books that attempt to explain what went wrong. Within ten to fifteen years, therefore, we saw a wide swing in evaluation of Japanese management practices.
Inside Japanese Business is a welcome book. In many previous books, various aspects of Japanese management are stereotyped and treated as if they do not change much over time. In this book, the authors attempt to analyze how Japanese business and management have changed over the long period of time between the early 1960s and the late 1990s. Based on the convergence hypothesis, the authors examine whether Japanese management practices have been converging toward US management practices or another common pattern by looking at the external environment in which Japanese firms operated in the last forty years and by reviewing the firsthand experiences of over thirty business people (the subjects of this study) who graduated from the same university in the early 1960s. Among various aspects of management practices, special attention was focused on human resource management, managerial decision making, and international operations of Japanese firms.
This book consists of six parts in twenty-two chapters. In Part I, which consists of three chapters, the authors present the conceptual framework of this study and also describe characteristics of Japanese business as...