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Inside the Kaisha: Demystifying Japanese Business Behavior
By Noboru Yoshimura and Philip Anderson, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997. 259 pages, hard cover, $24.95
This unusual book opens the door for Western managers to experience an enriched understanding of Japanese business behaviors as observed by a Japanese insider. It represents a collaboration between a mid-level Japanese manager and an American business school professor steeped in Western thinking about organizational behavior. The book enables the reader to experience Japanese business life by looking over the shoulder of a Japanese salaryman, or middle manager. (While women executives are continuing to make inroads in Japanese companies, the term salaryman is still widely used in Japan.)
This book is much different from other articles and books about Japanese management and Japan's spectacular economic success. Starting in the 1970s, Western scholars studied Japanese management systems and the organizational outcomes of Japanese business firms to find out why they were so successful. But in the 1980s, as typical Japanese enterprises continued to be quite successful, few Western practitioners questioned, for example, why many Japanese companies manufacturing in the United States did not use the formal...