ABSTRACT
There has been a long history of debates about the character of employment relations in the overseas plants of transnational firms. In Europe these have focused on the role of American companies, and have discussed the extent to which such plants seek to adapt to local labour markets and patterns of industrial relations, the circumstances under which they diverge from local practice and pursue global training and human resource policies, and the employment consequences of working for a branch-plant which is part of a global production process. These issues were also addressed in some of the early literature on Japanese branch-plants, but they have been increasingly subsumed into a more specific discussion couched in the contemporary terminology of the ‘transplanf and focused on the effective transplantation of Japanese production management techniques overseas. The chapters in Part II provide a set of critical interventions into this discussion of transplantation, and in so doing also broaden the agenda of debate once again, both by qualifying claims about the novelty of work and employment practices in the transplants, and by underlining their varied and potentially contested character.
