Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
depended primarily on the implementation of process innovations without
any requirement for labour training beyond the necessary repetitive tasks.
As such, labour productivity improvements over the previous seventy
years had generally come about primarily via the investments in improved
capital equipment, with little pressure on finding ways to increase labour
productivity by adjusting work patterns or methods.
From the early 1980s onwards, the structure, organization, and behav-
iour of Western manufacturing and production industries started to
change dramatically. These changes were initially driven by the decisions
of many large multinational corporations not only to radically re-think
the logic of their production systems, but also to undertake the rapid
implementation of these changes both domestically and also in their global
affiliates. Moreover, MNEs also required their suppliers to adopt similarly
radical changes in production thinking.
The modern inspiration for these new ideas is not at all American
or even Anglo-Saxon in origin, but Japanese. Although many of the
innovations introduced by the Japanese industry had actually originally
developed, at least in part, by American engineers who failed to find an
audience in the United States (Horsley and Buckley 1990; Fransman
1990), the development and widespread application of these new technolo-
gies and organizational innovations was an entirely Japanese phenomenon
(Freeman 1987, 1988; Odagiri and Goto 1993). Human resource manage-
ment strategies and organizational systems involving labour market
principles such as 'labour flexibility', 'quality circles' (QCs), 'continuous
improvement', and 'total quality management' (TQM), were all imported
into Western industry from Japan, and spearheading the importation and
implementation of these ideas was the US automobile industry (Kodama
1995). Taken together, all of these ideas generally came under the overall
umbrella concept of 'just-in-time' (JIT) manufacturing. JIT principles
focus on the drive for production which is characterized by minimum
levels of inventory-holding. These ideas originally derive from the US sky-
scraper construction industry of the inter-war years, and were refined by
the US Marine Corps as it moved across the Pacific in the Second World
War. During the early 1950s, however, this new production philosophy
was adopted and adapted by Toyota as a way of re-engineering its overall
production system so as to allow production capacity increases without
the need for increased space requirement or land-holdings (McCann
1998; Fujimoto 1999). By the 1960s, however, the principles and practices
common in the Japanese automobile industry had become widespread in
almost all of post-war Japanese industry (Schonberger 1996; Nishiguchi
1994), and were largely credited with much of Japan's success at mitigating
the effects of the oil-price shocks of the 1970s.
