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The literature has focused on manufacturing strategy issues from diverse perspectives, most of which are concentrated on hard issues such as marketing and R&D activities. However, relatively few articles have explored manufacturing strategy with soft issues, particularly organizational factors. This study attempts to clarify how firms select their manufacturing strategies based on their organization cultures and organization learning. Based on the related literature, this study infers hypotheses regarding the relationship between organizational cultures, organizational learning, and manufacturing strategies. This study conducts a survey by sampling firms of representative industries to examine the hypotheses. The empirical evidence from 103 respondents confirms the impact of organizational culture and learning on manufacturing strategies. This study provides a new insight on manufacturing strategy issues.
1. Introduction
The business and economic environment has dramatically changed more so than ever before, forcing firms to innovate in the ways they operate the business and to learn more or to fail. Innovation and innovativeness have become the critical factors for firms to survive. Studies in the literature tend to examine innovation-related issues by linking them with "hard" subjects, such as the relationships between marketing activities, R&D, and a firm's manufacturing strategy selection. Relatively few of them have examined links with "soft" subjects.
Recent studies have started to clarify innovation issues from organizational perspectives. Senge (1990), for instance, argues that building up a learning-based organization with continuous learning and improvement is one of the best ways to create competitive advantages. He further argues that organizational learning influences many aspects of an organization including manufacturing activities. Adam and Swamidass (1989) relate some organizational factors, such as scale, organizational structure, and member of organizations, to manufacturing strategy. Nonaka (1994) selects some world-level firms, such as 3M and Xerox, to explore how an organization creates its knowledge for manufacturing and innovation purposes. Studying manufacturing from the organizational issue side is a new and alternative direction in the near future.
Given that previous research on the above issues is limited and the results of these studies seem inconclusive, this study attempts to explore the effects of organizational factors -specifically, organizational cultures and organizational learning - on the innovation strategy of manufacturing activities. The study provides a new insight toward manufacturing functions and improving the knowledge on...