ABSTRACT
I had not realized until the publisher’s suggestion of a reprint made me look through it again, just how much this book was written for a different age from the present. The word ‘competitiveness’ just does not appear. Britain’s sense of being a reasonably successful industrial power had hardly been seriously shaken. Item five in the balance sheet in which I tried to sum up what seemed by my values to be the virtues and demerits of Britain’s and Japan’s two ways of organizing work in industry read: ‘The Japanese system seems to be more productive and better capable of delivering to all concerned in it a steadily rising level of real income’ (p. 277). But that was about all the book said by way of comment on Japan’s ‘success’ or Britain’s ‘decline’.
