The Quality Movement and Organizational Theory provides a framework within which organization theorists may learn from, reflect upon, and contribute to the development of new approaches to organizational change and improvement. The book includes contributions by researchers who have been at the forefront of assessing new quality approaches, how they work, and the conditions under which they are effective. It also draws upon other organizational scholars who reflect on current efforts and findings in an effort to better link them to existing knowledge. The book bridges the world of theory and practice, making academics aware of recent developments to improve organizational performance and exploring ways in which these efforts both contribute to and challenge current theories. Practitioners will profit from the concerns and insights of organizational scholars.

At a minimum our goal is to develop a better understanding of Japanese labor market practices and work organization and in so doing develop a more enlightened vision of American practices. We will greatly enhance our ability to achieve both these goals by arriving at a better understanding of the comparative experience of the two nations over time. We can no longer afford the delusion that what exists in the United States reflects the characteristics of industrial society in its most advanced form. Yet to follow current fashion in simply denying that the United States is the very model of a modern society, while advocating that we imitate the Japanese, is to take a course filled with its own pitfalls. Perhaps it is time we accepted the fact that the social scientist’s intense commitment to generalization cannot be allowed to obscure the fundamental observation that nations develop along their own paths, based on their own political, cultural, economic and social histories. As nations industrialize there is undoubtedly convergence in important institutional spheres, such as the expansion of education, the adoption of common technologies and determinants of labor mobility. Certainly nations can learn from one another, and indeed some nations impose their will on other nations. Yet there are also unique solutions to common problems. —From the Introduction This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Can managers learn from fads? That is the question Robert Cole addresses in this insightful book about the various factors supporting and inhibiting organizational learning. A longtime student of the Japanese and American quality movements, Cole focuses on the response of American industry to the challenge posed in the early 1980s by high quality goods from Japan. While most American managers view this challenge as slowly but successfully met, many academics see the quality movement that emerged from it as just another fad. In seeking to reconcile these two views, Cole explores the reasons behind American industry's slow response to Japanese quality, arguing that a variety of institutional factors inhibited management action in the early 1980s. He then describes the reshaping of institutions that allowed American companies to close the quality gap and to achieve sustained quality improvements in the 1990s. Hewlett-Packard serves as an example of a company that made this institutional transition more effectively than most. Cole describes Hewlett-Packard's successful strategies while also pointing out the serious problems that it and other companies face as they attempt to adapt, improve, and go beyond Japanese practices. He also uses Hewlett-Packard, an exemplar of the highly decentralized company, to explore effective strategies for the creation, dissemination, and implementation of knowledge. Unprecedented as a scholarly treatment of the quality movement,Managing Quality Fads provides several important lessons for those interested in management decision making under conditions of uncertainty and organizational transformation in a rapidly changing business environment.

The book is an intriguing study of four books of the Bible where the author shows how a series of symbols created from biblical stories can be used to uncover hidden numerical patterns that translate from language to language. Amongst other things, he shows that 1 Chronicles can be manipulated by an algorithm to produce the bloodlines of Jesus as they are in Matthew and Luke.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

As the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies reflected on the deteriorating position of the domestic auto industry in the fall of 1980, and the strong competitive threat being posed by the Japanese automakers, we were struck by the extraordinary low quality of the public discussion of these critical issues. The national importance of the issues seemed only matched by the superficiality of the analyses being offered. The tendency to think in terms of scapegoats was particularly evident. The Japanese as the basic cause of our problems has been a particularly notable theme. To be sure, cooperation with the Japanese in formulating a rational overall trade policy may be an important part of the solution. It has also been fashionable to blame it all on American auto industry management for not concentrating on the production of small cars when "everyone knew" that was the thing to do. Alternatively, government meddling was blamed for all our problems. Clearly, the complex problem we faced required more penetrating analyses. It seemed therefore, that the time was ripe for a public seminar which moved beyond the rhetoric of the moment and probed some of the deeper causes of our problems and possible directions for future policy.