ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Japanese manufacturing now has the same international status as American manufacturing in the first half of this century; its factories are sites of international pilgrimage and its manufacturing practices are objects of emulation. The growing number of Japanese branch factories in Europe and America, plus Western attempts to transfer Japanese manufacturing practices, make Japanization an inescapable topic. Some academics claim that Western factories are increasingly like Japanese factories. Oliver and Wilkinson’s (1988) book, for example, was provocatively titled The Japanization of British Industry. Other academics represent Japanese manufacturing as a model of technical excellence which could and should be adopted throughout the industrialized world; thus, the MIT study of the car industry (Womack, Jones and Roos 1990) has culminated in a long panegyric to ‘lean production’ as developed in Japan and imitated elsewhere.
