Japanese transplants and the work system revolution in United States manufacturing

This dissertation examines the impact that the U.S. operations of Japanese manufacturers are having on the use in the U.S. of innovative forms of work organization. Two main questions are addressed: (1) To what extent are Japanese-affiliated manufacturers using innovative approaches to organizing and managing production work in their U.S. "transplant" operations? (2) Are other manufacturers in the U.S. adopting similar innovations? In particular, is there evidence of learning by U.S.-owned manufacturers that supply the Japanese transplants?;This study goes beyond previous research on work practice innovations by presenting a theory to account for new forms of work organization that have been associated with large manufacturers in Japan and are now being adopted by industry in the West often under the label of "high performance work practices." The theory maintains that what distinguishes these new practices from earlier methods, and what explains their reported benefits for organizational performance, is their efficacy in fostering organizational learning. A working model of an innovative system of such practices is developed and then validated using the survey data and a structural equations methodology that makes it possible to test hypotheses about which practices should be included in the model and to examine the interrelations among these practices. With this method, we show that manufacturing plants that organize production work as a "learning-intensive work system" exhibit higher rates of manufacturing process innovation than do plants where work is managed in conventional ways.;Using cluster analysis to group the manufacturing plants in our sample according to their approach to managing production work, we identify a series of distinct strategies or "regimes," ranging from Taylorist to learning-intensive, with a "transitional" group in between. A variety of econometric methods are employed to develop profiles of each work system regime and to explain why a plant's management might adopt one strategy as opposed to another. The work system regime typology is used to examine and explain the variation in practice among the Japanese transplants in and across industries and to compare the pattern of practice among the transplants with that of a comparable set of U.S.-owned plants.;To answer these questions, the study takes advantage of data from a 1994 survey of a representative sample of Japanese-affiliated manufacturing plants in the U.S. as well as of U.S.-owned establishments that supply the Japanese transplant automobile assemblers.