Knowledge-driven Work: Unexpected Lessons from Japanese and United States Work Practices. . - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly, Sept, 2001 by Greg J. Bamber

Knowledge-driven Work: Unexpected Lessons from Japanese and United States Work Practices. Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Michio Nitta, Betty J. Barrett, Nejib Belhedi, Simon Sai-Chung Chow, Takashi Inaba, lwao Ishino, Wen-Jeng Lin, Michael L. Moore, William M. Mothersell, Jennifer Palthe, Shobha Ramanand, Mark E. Strolle, and Arthur C. Wheaton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 188 pp. $35.00.

Despite Japan's political, economic, and corporate woes, reports of Japan's death are an exaggeration (to paraphrase Mark Twain). Japan may not currently be the Number One country in terms of economic and business success and reputation, but Western managers and scholars nonetheless still have much to learn from Japanese management and work organizations. Such learning is especially appropriate as we move into a "knowledge economy," with an increasing emphasis on "virtual knowledge."

The comparative success of the Japanese economy and some of its leading manufacturing firms in the 1970s and 1980s induced much interest in Japanese management styles (sometimes called Japanization) in Western countries. This interest was illustrated by works such as Dore (1973), Lee and Schwendiman (1982), and many others. Womack, Jones, and Roos (1990) was a celebration of the power of the Japanese car industry. Most of its American and European competitors were running scared of the mighty Japanese. Gai-jin managers visited Japanese firms and tried with varying degrees of enthusiasm to implement Japanese-style management techniques, which were seen as their recipes of success. Although many Western managers and academics visited Japanese firms, like most tourists, they marveled at the sights but generally gained only a superficial understanding.

After the 1980s, the bubble burst. The Japanese economy and some of its leading firms stalled, and its stereotypical employment relations practices came under challenge (Bamber et al., 2000). Hitherto, Nissan, Mazda, and Mitsubishi, for example, had seemed unstoppable, but by 2000, they had each been driven to form strong links with European or American firms. Why, then, would serious scholars bother to publish another study of Japanization? There are at least four reasons why one should consider reading this study.

First, the authors generated a range of interesting and important insights into the notion of knowledge-driven work. Second, the team of 14 authors was a multicultural one that included researchers from Japan as well as the U.S.A. and eight other countries. The team represented eight distinct disciplines and succeeded in moving well beyond the superficial. Third, the authors have avoided the ethnocentric trap that many American observers of other countries' practices fall into. Fourth, this book will have a more lasting relevance than many of the earlier quick-fix books on Japanization.

The authors' objectives were to encapsulate the learning generated by eight Japanese-affiliated manufacturing plants in the U.S. and their sister facilities in Japan. They trace the flow of ideas from Japan to the U.S. and other countries, as well as the start of a reverse diffusion of innovation back to Japan. The book is a successful combination of empirical, conceptual, and theoretical work. It is organized into six categories: the cross-cultural diffusion of work practices, team-based work systems, Kaizen (continuous incremental improvement) and employee involvement, employment security, human resource management (HRM), and labor-management relations.

The book shows that Kaizen's emphasis on employee-driven problem solving is a strong counterpoint to the top-down notion of "re-engineering." Most U.S. managers believe that employment security restrains managerial flexibility. Managers at the selected firms, however, see employment security as essential to the flexibility associated with teamwork and Kaizen. The study of HRM suggests that, contrary to much conventional wisdom, there can be competitive advantages in diverse, older, unionized, and urban workforces. The book underlines the importance of employers committing to long-term training strategies.

It is in the employment relations field that Japanese firms have been least likely to export their ideas about "enterprise labor relations" into the U.S. context, which is often characterized as "adversarial." Yet the authors found their greatest challenge in trying to write about this field. Labor-management relations was the "wildcard" in the firms under scrutiny. The authors see terms such as "adversarial" and "enterprise labor relations" as overly simplistic. They find that unionized and nonunionized workplaces are not helpful distinctions in accounting for the diversity of practices, in comparison with distinctions based on the way knowledge is valued. Hence, they use the terms "symmetrical" and "complementary," and they consider the tangible and intangible components that shape labor relations in an attempt to capture some aspects of the emerging realities. New-style knowledge-driven work poses many challenges for the institutions associated with collective interests in the workplace. It remains to be s een how such challenges will be settled.