ABSTRACT
The topic of work organization has been of increasing importance to practitioners and scholars since the 1980s. The worldwide success of Japanese manufacturing companies at that time could not be explained simply by technological innovation nor by exploitation of cheap labor, but by the specific Japanese (lean and flexible) production system. During the 1990s the economic dynamic was thought to shift to service industries and the knowledge work of high-qualified employees. New forms of work organization like ‘high performance systems’, project work and virtual cross-border cooperation attracted scientific and practical attention in both the productive and service sectors.
