If we ask simply whether Japanese business has changed, our answer must be an unequivocal yes and this is answered with a primary focus on technology, the traditional source of Japan's strong competitiveness. But if we ask whether Japanese firms have also changed in any substantive ways we must accept a less sanguine conclusion.

The period of economic decline during the 1990s produced a wave of studies focusing on the failure of Japanese management according to western criteria. Yet Japanese manufacturing firms have continued to hold competitive power in the world market. This book identifies the institutional specificity of Japanese Management and the reasons behind its continued competitiveness. Through an exploration of the strategy and structure of Japanese manufacturing corporations the authors discover the essential features and strength of Japanese management systems, their problems and new trends, and consider how management strategies have been developed for future success. This new, sophisticated analysis of Japanese manufacturing corporations, based on data from over two hundred corporations, will enable the reader to better understand Japanese management systems and their potential to lay a foundation for successful management systems throughout the world.

After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries. This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.

In the past decade, a number of major Japanese companies have come under the control of foreign firms. Using a case-based approach, this book looks at how take-overs by foreign companies have changed HR and organisational practices traditionally associated with Japanese firms.

Between 2002 and 2008, Japan's economy saw constant expansion, a record among the world's advanced economies and Japan's longest period of economic growth since World War II. This remarkable achievement came about because of a transformation of Japanese business practices. This transformation was guided by strategies that enabled Japan's leading corporations, previously diversified to an exceptionally high degree, to become leaner, more nimble, and more competitive at home and in the global economy. In Choose and Focus, the first in-depth account of this strategic inflection point in Japanese business, Ulrike Schaede argues that the emerging practices and attitudes have created a New Japan. Drawing on profiles of several corporations, including Panasonic, Takeda and Astellas, Softbank, kakaku.com, and SBI E*Trade, Schaede explains how the fundamental principles of Japan's economy have been overturned. "Choose and focus" strategies, whereby corporations concentrate on core areas and spin off unrelated businesses, have completely altered the strategic logic of Japan's previous industrial architecture. These surprisingly aggressive moves, Schaede finds, have created new market opportunities for start-up enterprises and foreign investors, as well as a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers that have shaken Japanese companies out of complacency. Unlike the advances made by Japanese firms in the 1970s and 1980s, the current transformation is taking root in component and materials industries rather than in consumer products. Because of the relative obscurity of the changes and the overshadowing story of China's ascent, the Japanese corporate revolution has gone largely unnoticed among Western observers. Choose and Focus is required reading for anyone doing business in Japan or trying to understand how contemporary Japanese business works and how Japanese corporations have reinvented themselves to face the challenges—and realize the opportunities—of the 21st century.

Following the burst of the “economic bubble” in the 1990s, many Japanese companies were required to reform their management systems. Changes in corporate governance were widely discussed during that decade in studies on “Japanese management.” These discussions have resulted in little progress, however, since Americanization became the dominant discourse concerning governance and the management system. There have been few studies conducted from an academic point of view on the internal aspects of organizations that practice traditional Japanese management theory. This book examines how, and the degree to which, the development of market principles accompanying the advances of globalization has affected the traditional Japanese system. It focuses on four aspects of corporate management: management institutions, strategy, organization, and human resource management. The aggregation of the new management system in Japanese companies is regarded as a distinctive Japanese-style system of management. With emphasis on these four aspects, research was conducted on the basic structure of that system, following changes in the market, technology, and society. Further, specific functions of the basic structure of the Japanese-style management system were studied. Those findings are included here, along with a discussion and analysis of the direction of future changes.

Debates regarding corporate governance have become increasingly important in Japan as the post-war model of bank-based, stakeholder-oriented corporate governance faces the new pressures associated with globalization and growing investor demands for shareholder value. Bringing together a group of leading scholars from economics, law, sociology and management studies, this book looks at how the Japanese approach to corporate governance and the firm have changed in the post-bubble era.The contributions offer a unique empirical exploration of why and how Japanese firms are reshaping their corporate governance arrangements, leading to greater diversity among firms and new 'hybrid' forms of corporate governance. The book concludes by looking at what effect these incremental buttransformative changes may have on Japan's distinctive variety of capitalism.