BiblioVault - Books about Industrial Management

The American and Japanese Auto Industries in Transition

Report of the Joint U.S.–Japan Automotive Study

Robert E. Cole and Taizo Yakushiji, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1984

This report was prepared for the Policy Board by the U.S. and Japanese research staffs of the Joint U.S.–Japan Automotive Study under the general direction of Professors Paul W. McCracken and Keichi Oshima, with research operations organized and coordinated by Robert E. Cole on the U.S. side, in close communication with the Taizo Yakushiji on the Japanese side. [preface]

In view of the importance of stable, long-term economic relationships between Japan and the United States, automotive issues have to be dealt with in ways consistent with the joint prosperity of both countries. Furthermore, the current economic friction has the potential to adversely affect future political relationships. Indeed, under conditions of economic stagnation, major economic issues inevitably become political issues.

With these considerations in mind, the Joint U.S.–Japan Automotive Study project was started in September 1981 to determine the conditions that will allow for the prosperous coexistence of the respective automobile industries. During this two-year study, we have identified four driving forces that will play a major role in determining the future course of the automotive industry of both countries. These are: (1) consumers’ demands and aspirations vis-à-vis automobiles; (2) flexible manufacturing systems (FMS); (3) rapidly evolving technology; and (4) the internationalization of the automotive industry. [exec. summary]

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Arise

Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence

Jane Holgate

Pluto Press, 2021

'Jane Holgate is a brilliant thinker' - Jane McAlevey

In Arise, Jane Holgate argues that unions must revisit their understanding of power in order to regain influence and confront capital. Drawing on two decades of research and organizing experience, Holgate examines the structural inertia of today’s unions from a range of perspectives: from strategic choice, leadership and union democracy to politics, tactics and the agency afforded to rank-and-file members.

In the midst of a neoliberal era of economic crisis and political upheaval, the labor movement stands at a crossroads. Union membership is on the rise, but the ‘turn to organizing’ has largely failed to translate into meaningful gains for workers. There is considerable discussion about the lack of collectivism among workers due to casualization, gig work and precarity, yet these conditions were standard in the UK when workers built the foundations of the 19th-century trade union movement.

Drawing on history and case studies of unions developing and using power effectively, this book offers strategies for moving beyond the pessimism that prevails in much of today’s union movement. By placing power analysis back at the heart of workers’ struggle, Holgate shows us that transformational change is not only possible, but within reach.

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Arise

Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence

Jane Holgate

Pluto Press, 2021

'Jane Holgate is a brilliant thinker' - Jane McAlevey

In Arise, Jane Holgate argues that unions must revisit their understanding of power in order to regain influence and confront capital. Drawing on two decades of research and organizing experience, Holgate examines the structural inertia of today’s unions from a range of perspectives: from strategic choice, leadership and union democracy to politics, tactics and the agency afforded to rank-and-file members.

In the midst of a neoliberal era of economic crisis and political upheaval, the labor movement stands at a crossroads. Union membership is on the rise, but the ‘turn to organizing’ has largely failed to translate into meaningful gains for workers. There is considerable discussion about the lack of collectivism among workers due to casualization, gig work and precarity, yet these conditions were standard in the UK when workers built the foundations of the 19th-century trade union movement.

Drawing on history and case studies of unions developing and using power effectively, this book offers strategies for moving beyond the pessimism that prevails in much of today’s union movement. By placing power analysis back at the heart of workers’ struggle, Holgate shows us that transformational change is not only possible, but within reach.

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Automobiles and the Future

Competition, Cooperation, and Change

Robert E. Cole, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1983

At the time of the U.S.-Japan auto conferences in March 1983, the hoped-for economic recovery as manifested in auto sales had revealed itself quite modestly. Three months later, the indicators were more robust and certainly long overdue for those whose livelihood depends on the health of the industry--some of whom are university professors.

With Japanese import restrictions in place until March 1984 and drastically reduced break-even points for domestic manufactures, rising consumer demand holds great promise for the industry. The rapidly rising stock prices of the auto-makers captures well the sense of heightened optimism, as do the various forecasts for improved profits.

While the news is certainly welcome, it nevertheless should be greeted with caution. As Mr. Perkins noted at the conference, "we have a tendency to forget things very quickly. If we have a boom market this year, there is a good chance that a lot of things we learned will be forgotten."

To put the matter differently and more bluntly, with growing prosperity there is the risk that management will fall back into old habits, making impossible the achievement of sustained quality and productivity improvement. Similarly, the commitment to develop cooperative relations with workers and suppliers will weaken. The union will be under membership pressure to retrieve concessions rather than to take the longer-term view. This longer-term view recognizes that "up-front increases" and adherence to existing work rules increasingly come at the sacrifice of future job security. Government policymakers will turn their attention away from the industry. This may not mean a great deal given how weakly focused their attentions has been during the last three years and how mixed and contradictory government auto policies have been for over a decade.

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A Casebook on Corporate Renewal

Harlan D. Platt and Marjorie B. Platt, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

A Casebook on Corporate Renewal spans a variety of business areas relevant to corporate renewal and turnaround management. Corporate renewal, as a topic taught and discussed in business schools, has surged in the past decade. The cases in this book were selected to cover the knowledge and skills needed by successful turnaround managers, including ethical and legal issues; developing a plan of reorganization; and defining problems and their solutions, including strategic, financial, and operating issues.

The cases challenge students to actively engage in the decision-making process in order to learn how corporate renewal is practiced in real business settings. The Casebook is meant to accompany the third edition of Principles of Corporate Renewal by Harlan D. Platt, but it can be adopted separately or used with other management textbooks.

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A Casebook on Corporate Renewal

Harlan D. Platt and Marjorie B. Platt, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2004

A Casebook on Corporate Renewal spans a variety of business areas relevant to corporate renewal and turnaround management. Corporate renewal, as a topic taught and discussed in business schools, has surged in the past decade. The cases in this book were selected to cover the knowledge and skills needed by successful turnaround managers, including ethical and legal issues; developing a plan of reorganization; and defining problems and their solutions, including strategic, financial, and operating issues.

The cases challenge students to actively engage in the decision-making process in order to learn how corporate renewal is practiced in real business settings. The Casebook is meant to accompany the second edition of Principles of Corporate Renewal by Harlan D. Platt, but it can be adopted separately or used with other management textbooks.

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Competitiveness Matters

Industry and Economic Performance in the U.S.

Candace Howes and Ajit Singh, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2000

This book argues, against the current view, that competitiveness--that is, the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector--matters to the long-term health of the U.S. economy and particularly to its long-term capacity to raise the standard of living of its citizens. The book challenges the arguments popularized most recently by Paul Krugman that
competitiveness is a dangerous obsession that distracts us from the question most central to solving the problem of stagnant real income growth, namely, what causes productivity growth, especially in the service sector.
The central argument is that, if the U.S. economy is to achieve full employment with rising real wages, it is necessary to enhance the competitiveness of its tradable goods sector. The book shows that current account deficits cannot be explained by macroeconomic mismanagement but are rather the consequence of an uncompetitive manufacturing sector. It finds that the long-term health of the manufacturing sector requires not only across-the-board policies to remedy problems of low or inefficient investment, but also sectoral policies to address problems that are strategic to resolving the balance of payments problems. Lessons are drawn from the experience of some European and Asian countries.
This book will be of interest to economists, political scientists, and business researchers concerned with the place of the manufacturing sector in overall health of the U.S. economy, with issues of industrial policy and industrial restructuring, and with the conditions for rising standards of living.
Candace Howes is Associate Professor, Barbara Hogate Ferrin Chair, Connecticut College. Ajit Singh is Professor of Economics, Queens College, Cambridge.

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Continuous Improvement

Quality Control Circles in Japanese Industry

Paul Lillrank; Noriaki Kano

University of Michigan Press, 1989

Quality Control Circles (QCCs) are small groups of workers from the same workshop, which meet, often on their own time, to discuss ways to improve the quality of their work. They are supported by management; the circles and the support structure together are called Quality Control Circle (QCC) activity. The phenomenon is widespread in Japan: as of December 1987, 264,899 circles had been registered with more than two million members. QCC activities have spread to more than fifty countries worldwide and can be considered the most famous Japanese organizational innovation to date. The Japanese QCC, in its contribution to business application and theory, may rival the discovery of the informal organization of Hawthorne Studies frame.

The Japanese QCC movement has achieved quite impressive results, which are well described in the Japanese-language literature. Of concern, however, is what sustains and causes the phenomenon. The existing literature is quite thin on these mechanisms and forces.

Our aim in this research is to develop a systematic model of the organizational nature and management of Japanese QCC activities. Quality engineering and group dynamics are not part of this study; the focus is on the supporting arrangements, not on what happens within a circle. [1]

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Coordination and Information

Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise

Edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Daniel M. G. Raff

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Case studies that examine how firms coordinate economic activity in the face of asymmetric information—information not equally available to all parties—are the focus of this volume.

In an ideal world, the market would be the optimal provider of coordination, but in the real world of incomplete information, some activities are better coordinated in other ways. Divided into three parts, this book addresses coordination within firms, at the borders of firms, and outside firms, providing a picture of the overall incidence and logic of economic coordination. The case studies—drawn from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the modern business enterprise was evolving, address such issues as the relationship between coordination mechanisms and production techniques, the logic of coordination in industrial districts, and the consequences of regulation for coordination.

Continuing the work on information and organization presented in the influential Inside the Business Enterprise, this book provides material for business historians and economists who want to study the development of the dissemination of information and the coordination of economic activity within and between firms.

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Engineering Culture

Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation

Gideon Kunda

Temple University Press, 2006

Engineering Culture is an award-winning ethnography of the engineering division of a large American high-tech corporation. Now, this influential book—which has been translated into Japanese, Italian, and Hebrew—has been revised to bring it up to date. In Engineering Culture, Gideon Kunda offers a critical analysis of an American company's well-known and widely emulated "corporate culture." Kunda uses detailed descriptions of everyday interactions and rituals in which the culture is brought to life, excerpts from in-depth interviews and a wide variety of corporate texts to vividly portray managerial attempts to design and impose the culture and the ways in which it is experienced by members of the organization. The company's management, Kunda reveals, uses a variety of methods to promulgate what it claims is a non-authoritarian, informal, and flexible work environment that enhances and rewards individual commitment, initiative, and creativity while promoting personal growth. The author demonstrates, however, that these pervasive efforts mask an elaborate and subtle form of normative control in which the members' minds and hearts become the target of corporate influence. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees' work behavior and on their sense of self. In the conclusion written especially for this edition, Kunda reviews the company's fortunes in the years that followed publication of the first edition, reevaluates the arguments in the book, and explores the relevance of corporate culture and its management today.

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Industrial Sterilization

International Symposium

G. Briggs Phillips and William S. Miller, eds.

Duke University Press

Industry at the Crossroads

Robert E. Cole, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1982

The mood of the first U of M U.S.-Japan Auto conference in January 1981 could only be described as electric. People wanted to know what our problems were and how we could begin to solve them. Inherent in the latter issue was the questions, what could we learn from the Japanese? One left the conference with a sense that there was a call for action, a mandate to address the problems facing industry.

The mood, about a year later, at the March 1982 U.S.-Japan Auto Conference was far more subdued. While undoubtedly this reflected the stream of statistics confirming the continually depressed state of the industry, another dynamic was possibly operating as well. Whereas the 1981 conference was "electric," a state of mind which flowed from a certain frustration at seemingly overwhelming difficulties and often vague expectations of what we might learn from the Japanese, the 1982 conference was more "workmanlike" in the sense that speakers discussed specifically what progress was being made in addressing problems. This more subdued, pragmatic approach continued throughout wand was reinforced by workshops held the day after the main conference.

Instead of discussing the virtues of the Just-In-Time system in Japan, speakers addressed the practical problems of introducing such a system in the U.S. firms. Instead of railing about the benefits or failings of regulation of the industry, they discussed what we could reasonably expect from regulation. Instead of exhorting the industry to adopt Japanese practices willy-nilly, they focused on some of the limitations of the Japanese model in a range of different areas. Instead of trying to identify some magic key to Japanese success in the automotive industry, they discussed the interrelationships among various factors. At the same, they continued to explore the basic issues transforming the auto industry worldwide. In this connection, they sought to unravel some of the complexities associated with the internalization of the auto industry and trade obligations under the GATT.

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The Japanese Automotive Industry

Model and Challenge for the Future?

Robert E. Cole, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1981

As the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies reflected on the deteriorating position of the domestic auto industry in the fall of 1980, and the strong competitive threat being posed by the Japanese automakers, we were struck by the extraordinary low quality of the public discussion of these critical issues. The national importance of the issues seemed only matched by the superficiality of the analyses being offered. The tendency to think in terms of scapegoats was particularly evident. The Japanese as the basic cause of our problems has been a particularly notable theme. To be sure, cooperation with the Japanese in formulating a rational overall trade policy may be an important part of the solution. It has also been fashionable to blame it all on American auto industry management for not concentrating on the production of small cars when "everyone knew" that was the thing to do. Alternatively, government meddling was blamed for all our problems. Clearly, the complex problem we faced required more penetrating analyses. It seemed therefore, that the time was ripe for a public seminar which moved beyond the rhetoric of the moment and probed some of the deeper causes of our problems and possible directions for future policy.

In holding the January 1981 auto conference, the Center took it as their task to begin addressing the critical issues facing the industry, with particular, but not exclusive, attention to examining the role of the Japanese auto industry. They had in mind not to simply conduct a rational discussion of the trade issue but to probe the sources of Japanese competitive strength, especially those features whose study might profit them.

In these proceedings, they bring those discussions to a wider audience. Question and answer sessions at the conference were necessarily short and a few speakers delivered abbreviated remarks; this volume restores a number of omissions, and provides additional answers to some pertinent questions put by the audience. The Center hopes to encourage the serious problem-solving these complex issues demand. Far too much time has been spent trying to fix the blame. [intro]

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Losing Time

The Industrial Policy Debate

Otis Graham

Harvard University Press, 1992

Japan has had one since before the Pacific War. Germany has always had one. Britain has had one after another. Shouldn't the United States get one?

Though hotly debated throughout the 1980s, this was the wrong question, leading to years of delay and confusion. The United States already had an Industrial Policy, said Otis Graham, but one which was uncoordinated and often harmful. This policy morass, which continued in the 1990s under George Bush despite the erosion of America's competitive position, owes much to a misunderstood history of government economic policy. Elements of both parties, but especially Reagan Republicans, have obscured our real choices with historical myths.

What should the United States have done when the nation saw its industries rapidly becoming globally uncompetitive? What reforms do we need now, asks Graham, to redirect our public policies for competitive strength? Industrial policy reform is an important part of a public-private set of remedies, but it hinges upon an improved use of policy history and of historical perspective generally. He proposes an explicit if minimalist approach by the federal government that would pull together and reform our de facto industrial policies in order to equip the United States with the institutional capacity to formulate industrial interventions guided by continuous learning, strategic vision, and bipartisan participation by both labor and management.

Losing Time is important reading for policy-makers, community leaders, academics involved in public policy, economics, and history, and readers generally concerned about their future.

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Paradigms and Conventions

Uncertainty, Decision Making, and Entrepreneurship

Young Back Choi

University of Michigan Press, 1993

An innovative approach to the analysis of decision making under uncertainty

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Principles of Corporate Renewal

Harlan D. Platt

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Since its publication in 1998, this indispensable text has been the only systematic examination of corporate renewal, offering a rational approach for dealing with financially distressed companies. It contains the first logical and orderly discussion of a number of modern business issues including outsourcing, turnaround management, layoffs, quality management, and reengineering.

Now in its third edition, Harlan D. Platt has revised, updated, and expanded the text. As the first edition did, this new Principles of Corporate Renewal cuts to the heart of the patterns, procedures, and pitfalls of bringing a corporation back to life and health. New and exciting materials in this edition include factors to consider on the first day of a turnaround assignment and essential turnaround questions that help assess and focus the turnaround effort. This is a highly readable book on a fairly complex topic.

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Principles of Corporate Renewal, Second Edition

Harlan D. Platt

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Since its publication in 1998, this indispensable text has been the only systematic examination of corporate renewal, offering a rational approach for dealing with financially distressed companies. It contains the first logical and orderly discussion of a number of modern business issues including outsourcing, turnaround management, layoffs, quality management, and reengineering.

Now in its second edition, Harlan D. Platt has revised, updated, and expanded the text to include a new chapter on bankruptcy law, a profile of the turnaround manager, and an overview of the typical turnaround engagement. As the first edition did, this new Principles of Corporate Renewal cuts to the heart of the patterns, procedures, and pitfalls of bringing a corporation back to life and health.

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Scale and Scope

The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism

Alfred D. Chandler Jr.

Harvard University Press, 1990

Scale and Scope is Alfred Chandler’s first major work since his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Visible Hand. Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late twentieth century’s most important developments.

This edition includes the entire hardcover edition with the exception of the Appendix Tables.

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Workers Can Win

A Guide to Organising at Work

Ian Allinson

Pluto Press, 2022

Drawing on more than 20 years of organizing experience, Allinson combines practical techniques with an analysis of the theory and politics of organizing and unions.

The Covid, climate, and cost of living crises all hang heavy in the air. It's more obvious than ever that we need radical social and political change. But in the vacuum left by defeated labor movements, where should we begin? For longtime workplace activist Ian Allinson, the answer is clear: organizing at work is essential to rebuild working-class power.

The premise is simple: organizing builds confidence, capacity, and collective power - and with power, we can win change. Workers Can Win is an essential, practical guide for rank-and-file workers and union activists.

The book offers insight into tried and tested methods for effective organizing. It deals with tactics and strategies and addresses some of the roots of conflict, common problems with unions, and the resistance of management to worker organizing. As a 101 guide to workplace organizing with politically radical horizons, Workers Can Win is destined to become an essential tool for workplace struggles in the years to come.

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