Knowledge that Transforms

The expansion of Japanese FDI into the UK manufacturing sector during the 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to the debate on the Japanization of British industry. The paper argues that this debate was constructed from a Western perspective. It did not locate the strategies and structures of Japanese subsidiaries within the broader context of how Japanese multinational corporations were evolving in this period. The necessity to look at these issues from a more global perspective is reinforced by the changes which have occurred since the mid 1990s in the environment for Japanese multinationals. The global economy offers more choices to firms about their location as well as facing them with a more competitive environment. In the Japanese case, this is leading to a growing differentiation between standardized mass production (which can be located in Asia and Eastern Europe) and science–led sectors of industrial production (which necessitate location near to centres of research and development expertise in the USA and Europe). This means that Japanese firms are reconsidering the strategy and structure of their subsidiaries in the UK. Standardized mass production will only survive in the UK as long as costs can be pushed further down and productivity increased, both of which are difficult conditions to meet given possibilities elsewhere in the world for cheap mass production. The growing area of investment will be in science–based manufacturing, though here the UK will be competing against the USA and Germany for Japanese investment. Here, however, the organizational and management characteristics of Japanese subsidiaries will make the necessary connections with local managers and local networks of expertise difficult to achieve. Thus Japanese subsidiaries in the UK are in a period of prolonged uncertainty about their role in the future. These changes open up the necessity for a new agenda of research which goes beyond the Japanization approach and is concerned with the organization and management of Japanese multinationals in an era of global competition.

This paper explores the meaning of the state–sponsored initiative for people management, Investors in People (IiP), through deconstruction of the signifiers that represent its articulation. Semiotic analysis is employed in order to consider the sign–value that is associated with IiP and to explore the symbolic meaning of cultural artefacts, such as ‘the badge’ and ‘the flag’, which feature in the experience of managers and employees in six case study organizations. This post–structuralist approach enables us to focus on the discursive construction of textual meaning surrounding IiP as a ‘readerly’ as well as a writerly project. It is suggested that organizations are subject to a process of image production and consumption. This process requires them to seek differentiation from other organizations by acquiring quality initiatives that constitute a system of objects. In particular, the meaning of IiP signifiers as emblems of achievement is explored and the extent to which these become simulacra is considered. It is argued that there is a significant gap between writerly intentions as to what quality initiatives ought to signify and their organizational, context–bound, indeterminate meanings. By elucidating the conditions of IiP's signification it is shown that this discourse has the potential to undermine the very philosophy it asserts. Finally, drawing on this analysis, we outline the way that badge acquisition develops over time through processes of accumulation and adaptation.

This study draws on multiple writings to offer a new conceptualization, one that aids in the assessment of unethical practices. Traditionally, phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge have focused on perception, cognition and common sense. Ethnomethodology has focused on procedural infrastructures of ordinary lives. This article combines concepts and ideas from these methodologies in the general concept of ‘collective myopia’ with some Habermasian and Foucaultian influences. The conceptualization focuses on normative controls operating behind the scenes of unethical practices in Japanese business. The contributions of national culture to the crimes are omitted as much as possible to establish a position of general theory. The conceptualization is then applied to examine the case of the Dai‐ichi Kangyo Bank, which was linked to racketeering in 1997.

This paper examines how dress can be implicated in contests regarding individual and organizational identities. Identities are understood as being constituted within discursive regimes, and to be subjectively available to people in the form of self–narratives. The pluralism and polyphony that characterize organizations means that collective self–narratives are likely to be fractured, contested and multi–layered. It is in this context that attire is an important object symbol that conveys information about the individual and collective self. Here we focus on aspects of dress, especially the Islamic headscarf, and its role in the dynamics of collective identity maintenance and challenge in one all–female Turkish university department. Our ethnographic approach yielded multiple, related and sometimes overlapping story lines centred on dress. These we have chosen to represent as a single though multi–voiced faculty narrative in order to facilitate analysis of what was a particularly rich symbolic milieu. The principal research contribution of this paper is as a discussion of participants’ clothing in the constitution of individual and organizational narrative identities, and its importance for understanding the dynamics of identity conflicts.

This article examines the centrality of discourse in achieving managerially relevant outcomes, with a focus on the in‐situ performance context of corporate storytellers. The Ricœurian concept of speech act, capturing both the intentionality of organizational discourse and the social context of its production and reception, implicitly guided our research effort. The article has at its core a story of how senior organizational officers exploited the volatile circumstances of a public takeover in Singapore. By looking at the social construction of narratives in their many fragments we come to see how a key protagonist carves out a powerful position. The efficacy of his performances can be seen to be dependent upon the effective use of poetic tropes and the receptiveness of listeners to particular Chinese archetypal relationship‐driven themes. In crafting our story we use multiple texts which were produced in and around two case organizations. As such we offer a carefully constructed collage, a mixture of production and reproduction, sticking closely to forms of communication that key organizational actors used to plan, enact and interpret their actions and those of others. Whilst our story offers insights to readers with an interest in organizational discourse, corporate governance and Asian management practices, we refrain from imposing an authoritarian interpretation that insists on identifying with the intentions of the authors.

Research on management development has been characterized by broad surveys of training activity, in–depth analyses of development methods and, more occasionally, attempts to evaluate the impact of training investment. The result is a fragmentary picture of management development practice, providing incomplete insight into why certain policies and activities succeed or fail. Drawing upon a large sample of those responsible for human resource development in their organizations, this paper proposes a theoretical framework which attempts to identify the key variables in a more coherent and comprehensive manner. The HRM context of a firm is found to be highly responsible for the management development processes it adopts; the amount of training undertaken is largely determined by priority, and, in turn, amount is the key determinant of perceived success.

Whereas a majority of previous research in the diversification literature has focused on the performance consequences of diversification strategy, this paper examines the reverse relationship, that is, the effects of a firm’s prior performance on the choice between related and unrelated diversification. This paper empirically tests and confirms the view that there are systematic ex ante performance differences between firms diversifying into related businesses and firms diversifying into unrelated businesses. These findings imply that ex post performance differences between related and unrelated diversifiers, often reported in previous research, are largely attributable to these ex ante performance differences, not to diversification strategy per se.

Despite the widely‐recognized importance of innovation to organizational competitiveness and national economic well‐being, and despite the extensive commentary on the topic, the managerial processes which contribute to innovativeness and the factors and processes inhibiting its achievement remain underexplicated. This article contributes to an understanding of the management of innovation by approaching the innovation problem from an analysis of the accounts, interpretations and theories of the actors closely engaged with the process. Focusing on a large telecommunications equipment manufacturer, this article reveals how managerial discourse may hold the key to understanding the nature of the barriers to effective innovation.

This study is a replication of Bettman and Weitz (1983) in the Singapore context. Data from Letters to Shareholders in 208 annual reports published in 1985 and 1994 were used to analyse the patterns of causal explanations for corporate performance outcomes. The general self‐serving pattern of attributions found in the original study was also identified in this study. However, the data of the original study do not unequivocally support either the motivational or informational explanation for the existence of self‐serving attributions, whereas the latter explanation is strongly supported by the data of this study. This finding is consistent with the growing evidence provided by cross‐cultural psychological research indicating East Asians’ greater sensitivity to situational influences when making causal attributions. In short, the present study clearly illustrates the important role of replication in the knowledge accumulation and theory development of strategy research.

This study tests the effects of cultural differences on the behaviour and performance of joint‐ventures. We first study the relationship and predictions of two relevant theories, i.e., the theory about cultural diversity and that about cultural distance. After that, we apply the theories to study the behaviour and performance of Sino‐Japanese and Sino‐West joint ventures (JVs). Processing data from 2718 such JVs in different parts of China, we show evidence supporting our arguments. Our paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of the findings.