While some writers account for Japan's postwar economic "miracle" in terms of a distinctively Japanese, traditional model of social organization, the writers of this study consider Japan's technological growth to have been accompanied by convergence toward modernized social organization. The authors test both of these theoretical models. Their data are derived from a nine-month period of observation, analysis of company records, interviews of personnel, and questionnaire responses from production, staff, and managerial employees in three main Japanese firms. Other firms were visited more briefly. The analysis shows that the most distinctively Japanese variables have less causal impact on performance within a firm than do more universal variables such as employee status, sex, and job satisfaction. The authors test both of these theoretical models. Their data are derived from a nine-month period of observation, analysis of company records, interviews of personnel, and questionnaire responses from production, staff, and managerial employees in three main Japanese firms. Other firms were visited more briefly. The analysis shows that the most distinctively Japanese variables have less causal impact on performance within a firm than do more universal variables such as employee status, sex, and job satisfaction. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work...read more

How do companies in high labor cost countries manage to remain competitive? In western manufacturing, the more manual a process, the more severe the competitive handicap of high wages. Full automation would make labor costs irrelevant but remain impractical in most industries. Most successful manufacturing processes in advanced economies are neither fully manual nor fully automatic -- they involve interactions between small numbers of highly skilled people and machines that account for the bulk of the manufacturing costs and thereby remain competitive. In Working with Machines: The Nuts and Bolts of Lean Operations With Jidoka, author Michel Baudin explains how performance differences that can be observed from one factory to the next are due to the way people use the machines -- from the human interfaces of individual machines to the linking of machines into cells, the management of monuments and common services, automation, maintenance, and production control.

Product Description: The authors use their decades of experience and draw upon real-world examples to demonstrate that the application of their techniques provides a basis for equipment management, uptime maximization, and reduced maintenance costs. The text explores reliability assessment techniques such as Failure Mode, Effect Analysis, and Fault Tree Analysis of commonly encountered rotating machinery...read more

Product Description: For Ford, the machine was not only the symbol of man's mastery of his environment, but also the means whereby he could release his intellectual and spiritual powers. Ford himself in his prime, contrary to popular stereotype, was far less interested in amassing wealth or in mass producing than in providing a service...read more

This study of the advent of computers in the workplace examines the impact of automation on workers in several fields, concluding that business must integrate their employees with new technologies if automation is to succeed

Product Description: A noted Harvard social scientist documents the pitfalls and promises of computerized technology in business life.

Product Description: Human skill and judgment are needed now more than ever to effectively run today's complex computerized production systems. In this thought-provoking study of work, worker, and machine in the postindustrial age, Hirschhorn points out that factories will become places of learning where the worker must be able to diagnose and solve an array of problems generated by error-prone machine systems...read more

Product Description: Book by International Labour Office

Product Description: Book by Anderson, Sherwood