ABSTRACT
Do Japanese companies invest more in training their engineers than British companies? What difference does the lifetime employment system make to the education and training of engineers? Interest in answers to these questions grew rapidly in Britain in the 1980s as part of attempts to address the complaints that British companies invested too little in training their labour force and that poor levels of knowledge and skills were important factors in the relatively disappointing economic performance of the British economy. It was widely expected that Japanese companies would be found to invest more in training, and the ready explanation was that Japanese companies would invest more in their employees since they would recoup the benefits from lifetime employees. On closer inspection, however, many of these discussions turned out to be circular re-statements of what were largely assumed to be self-evident truths. It was largely an article of faith that Japanese companies would spend more on training their employees than their British counterparts (Gregory 1984:53; Coopers and Lybrand 1985). This air of plausibility was logically consistent with the success of Japanese companies in world markets for manufactured goods and what was known of the ‘lifetime employment’ system (IMS 1984; Handy 1987). It seemed intuitively obvious that employers would invest more in employee skill development if they could be confident that they would harvest the fruits of their investment. Yet attempts to test the proposition of greater investment and to document these international differences found that Japanese companies recorded smaller training budgets and lower expenditures than their British counterparts (Dore and Sako 1987; Wersky 1986). So, if the intuitively obvious answer is not borne out by the available evidence, where does one turn for an explanation of the links between company training and employment systems?
