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This 2003 book offered the first in-depth international survey of contemporary research and debates in business history. Over the two decades leading to its publication, enormous advances had been made in writing the history of business enterprise and business systems. Historians are documenting and analyzing the evolution of a wide range of important companies and systems, their patterns of innovation, production, and distribution, their financial affairs, their political activities, and their social impact. Each essay is written by a prominent authority who provides an assessment of the state and significance of research in his or her area. This volume is a reference work that will be of immense value to historians, economists, management researchers, and others concerned to access the latest insights on the evolution of business throughout the world.
This volume undertakes the important task of envisioning a regional history of Asia based on its unique internal characteristics, going beyond the usual West/non-West dichotomy. The “regional trade zone of modern Asia” was debated in the 1980s. Since then, Japanese historians of the socioeconomic history of Asia have explored how the traditional trade relations that had developed over the centuries in Asia responded to the so-called Western impacts in the mid-nineteenth century, including the opening of ports and tariff reduction under free trade regimes and the advance in transportation technology. Against this academic background, the four chapters in this volume examine how overseas C...
The goal of this path-breaking volume is to relativize the experience of Japanese industries in terms of both location and time, exploring its similarities and differences with other countries and its unique relationship with the global standard of company performance set by US firms. Yongdo Kim looks beyond organizational principles, overturns stereotypes, and covers a wide range of industries. In particular, this book focuses on the intertwining of the market principle and the organizational principle in interfirm relationships among the steel, machine tool, integrated circuit and liquid-crystal display materials industries, concluding that there is no such thing as ‘Japanese uniqueness�...
This collection of essays examines the history of cotton textiles at a global level over the period 1200-1850. It provides new answers to two questions: what is it about cotton that made it the paradigmatic first global commodity? And second, why did cotton industries in different parts of the world follow different paths of development?
In this important new book, the authors explore how production was organized in the context of the economic development of modern Japan. Production organizations are taken to mean the long-term relationships which economic agents create for production, based on employment contracts or long-term transactions. This includes hierarchical organizations such as factories and corporations, but also flexible arangements such as subcontracting. Modern Japanese economic development is characterized by the co-evolution of these two types of production organizations, while American economic development in the modern period is characterized by the development of a mass production system based on large hierarchical organizations. The question is raised as to why and how a certain type of organization proliferated in a certain industry in a certain period, and what the role of that organization was in coordinating production and giving incentives to the economic agents involved. The result is a comparative institutional analysis of the organizational foundations of Japanese economic development in the modern period.
This book is the first volume of a monograph series published by the Socio-Economic History Society, Japan. The purpose of the series is to make works by Japanese scholars accessible to a wider readership and to increase the knowledge of scholars in this field, particularly in relation to Asia. This volume includes four chapters on energy and the environment of Japan, China and Britain and four short book reviews on recent academic works published in Japanese and English. The four chapters cover the following topics: the relationship between deforestation and the development of the silk reeling industry in a district of Nagano Prefecture (central Japan) from the 1870s to the 1900s and the subsequent shift from firewood to coal; the importance of timber supplies for the development of industry as illustrated by a case study on the supply of timber for use as rail sleepers in the Japanese national railway network during the prewar period; a methodological survey of the history of ecology and the environment in China; and an analysis of the British Smoke Nuisance Abatement Act of 1821 as a measure that incorporated the interests of politicians, landlords and industrialists.
For Western economists and journalists, the most distinctive facet of the post-war Japanese business world has been the keiretsu, or the insular business alliances among powerful corporations. Within keiretsu groups, argue these observers, firms preferentially trade, lend money, take and receive technical and financial assistance, and cement their ties through cross-shareholding agreements. In The Fable of the Keiretsu, Yoshiro Miwa and J. Mark Ramseyer demonstrate that all this talk is really just urban legend. In their insightful analysis, the authors show that the very idea of the keiretsu was created and propagated by Marxist scholars in post-war Japan. Western scholars merely repatriated the legend to show the culturally contingent nature of modern economic analysis. Laying waste to the notion of keiretsu, the authors debunk several related “facts” as well: that Japanese firms maintain special arrangements with a “main bank,” that firms are systematically poorly managed, and that the Japanese government guided post-war growth. In demolishing these long-held assumptions, they offer one of the few reliable chronicles of the realities of Japanese business.
This book is intended for manufacturing and engineering professionals and academics.
In The Logic of Conformity, Tomoko T. Okagaki examines Japan’s entry into the European state system in the late nineteenth century. Okagaki focuses on the extraordinary degree of conformity that Japan demonstrated in accommodating itself to Western norms of international relations within a very short period of time. By introducing a political science perspective to the study of Japan’s modernization, which has heretofore been studied mostly as a historical subject, she emphasizes the significance of contextual factors that constrained the ways in which Japan entered international society. As Okagaki shows, while the international system defined the mode of Japan’s socialization in many ways, Japan’s entry also symbolized a transformation of the international system from that of Euro-dominance to legal equality. A sophisticated and significant contribution to the literature on state building and the history of international relations, The Logic of Conformity is a fascinating study of how the concept of sovereignty is reshaped by the entrance of newcomers.
In the wake of globalization, international management has gained importance as a decisive element behind the success of a business enterprise, however little is known about the collective strategies between two foreign firms in an overseas market. This book discusses the theory of collective international strategies and the adaptation of Japanese and German companies to the changing conditions of global competition due to third market business cooperation. The author analyses the management style of Japanese-German business cooperation in Asia on a strategic and operative level and offers advice for the success of collective strategies and shows what we can learn from Japanese-German companies in Asian markets.