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The Japanese Management Model

Tacit Skills in Shop Floor Participation

London School of Economics

A distinctive element of the Japanese management model is the greater role given to workers' knowledge. For some, this may simply be a further example of the expropriation by management of workers' skills and hence the perfection of Taylorism. For others it may indicate yet again the continual failure of Taylorism. In this perspective the Japanese management would simply be making explicit what is going on anyway, that is, the exercising of tacit skills. Can the involvement of workers in job design under the Japanese model then be treated as one of its distinguishing features? It is suggested in this article that Japanese workers' participation is distinctive insofar as it explicitly involves them in industrial engineering. The precise meaning and distinctiveness of this involvement derives from the wider innovations in production management, such as just-in-time (Kanban) and the continuous learning program (Kaizen), as well as other aspects of Japanese personnel practice. Such innovations have reversed certain features of conventional production management, but not the central tenets of mass production. The abolition of buffer stocks, centralized quality control, and the sovereignty of the industrial engineer have all been questioned within Japanese concepts. The article concludes by drawing out the implications of their development for a number of areas of theoretical concern, including conceptions of tacit skills, flexible specialization, and autonomy.

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