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Introduction
Japan's management philosophy has introduced a new creative strategy for competitive success in business, or the so-called "Kaizen" model. When Masaaki Imai published his first book in 1986, The Key to Japan's Competitive Success , the term Kaizen began to receive attention from management experts and scholars around the world. Kaizen is a Japanese word, which means "continuous improvement" ([22] Manos, 2007). In the broader sense, [16] Imai (1986) defined Kaizen as "the process of continuous improvement in any arena of life, personal, social, home, or work." In business, he defined it as "the process of gradual and incremental improvement in a pursuit of perfection of business activities." Under this strategy, continuous improvement is considered to be everybody's job in an organization, in that any employee must do his/her job and improve it ([8] Channon, 2005).
A decade after publishing his first book, Imai revisited Kaizen in another book in 1997 - a contribution which further enhanced Kaizen strategy "the Japanese way" by stressing the importance of the workplace (where real action occurs) in continuous improvement. According to Kaizen, not a single day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in an organization. Even "total quality management," which has received focused attention in the literature in recent years, was found deeply rooted in the Japanese management, and thus viewed as an integral element in Kaizen strategy.
During the 1990s, the Kaizen model received much attention by many scholars and experts worldwide. Their contributions showed overall positive reactions to the model (For example, [26] Oliver and Wilkinson, 1992; [35] Williams et al. , 1992; [10] Conti and Warner, 1993; [28] Sengenberger and Campbell, 1993; [33] Webb and Bryant, 1993; [31] Storey, 1994).
During the 2000s, specifically the past eight years, the model drew more attention in the literature and continued to receive growing support worldwide. For example, [22] Manos (2007) indicated that Kaizen had qualitative and quantitative benefits, including more time and money saving with reduced inventory cost. [25] Neese (2007) maintained that Kaizen helped improve work processes and implement lean manufacturing throughout the supply chain. [34] Wilcox and Morton (2006) viewed Kaizen as a strategy to reduce energy consumption and waste, and yet improve productivity in targeted activities and processes....