Implications and Setbacks of the Japanization of the European Automobile Industry : Organizational Gaps Observed by Japanese Transplant Managers in the 1990s

The term Japanization became popular in Europe, especially in the UK, only in the last ten years of the twentieth century. Japanization was at first regarded as a package of excessive labour-intensification measures taken by the management to meet the international competition. Therefore, the term originally had a negative and pejorative connotation, which symbolized the view of the traditional labour movement. This paper relies primarily on interviews held in the early 1990s with Japanese transplant managers, revealing the existence of gaps in organizations, to clarify retrospectively the significance of Japanization at the end of the twentieth century in Europe and the reasons for its setbacks