This book describes why, for the past twenty-five years, Japanese productivity has been growing more rapidly than productivity in the U.S. Unlike other books on the subject of the Japanese success in manufacturing, it looks at what actually happens in factories. The author brings his experience of working at the Yanagicho Works of the Toshiba Corporation, in Kawasaki City. Like so many Japanese factories, this one is highly productive, efficient, and flexible. While the factory is ordinary looking on the outside, its workers are anything but ordinary as they constantly strive to improve the...

Despite the negative press Asian economies have received in connection with the recent financial crisis, their record of spectacular growth over the past few decades remains irrefutable. In an effort to provide a rich, textured analysis of these economies, editor W. Mark Fruin presents a collection of essays that explores the wide range of network organizations that have been established in the Pacific Rim.
Conventional studies of economic organization have tended to center on markets and hierarchies, the two forms of organization most common in the West. But today the world moves too...