ABSTRACT
Ever since the late 1950s, when pioneering foreign scholars began serious acadernic inquiries into Japanese business and management (Abegglen 1958; Levine 1958; Karsh and Cole 1968; Cole 1971), a long list of practices have been identified as uniquely Japanese (Okochi, Karsh, and Levine 1974; Patrick and Rosovsky 1976; Ouchi 1981; Shirai 1983; Koike 1988; Fruin 1992;Aoki and Dore 1994). While some were discovered early (e.g., permanent employment), others were added to the list more recently (e.g., corporate govemance).
