How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Individualism and collectivism

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Over the past 30 years, conservation of resources (COR) theory has become one of the most widely cited theories in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. COR theory has been adopted across the many areas of the stress spectrum, from burnout to traumatic stress. Further attesting to the theory's centrality, COR theory is largely the basis for the more work-specific leading theory of organizational stress, namely the job demands-resources model. One of the major advantages of COR theory is its ability to make a wide range of specific hypotheses that are much broader than those offered by theories that focus on a single central resource, such as control, or that speak about resources in general. In this article, we will revisit the principles and corollaries of COR theory that inform those more specific hypotheses and will review research in organizational behavior that has relied on the theory.

Conservation of Resources in the Organizational Context: The Reality of Resources and Their Consequences

https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/download/14795/13847

Men and Women of the Corporation

Expatriates are often presented in the cross-cultural adjustment literature as a homogeneous, broad population. However, recent research that makes a distinction between organizational expatriates (OEs), those who are dispatched by their home companies to international posts, and self-initiated expatriates (SIEs), those who themselves make the decision to live and work abroad, has identified differences between the two groups. The present study compares the cross-cultural adjustment of these two groups of expatriates. Survey results of 179 expatriates in Japan show that SIEs are better adjusted to general aspects of their host country and interactions with host-country nationals than OEs. Suggestions for practice are provided.

Organizational expatriates and self-initiated expatriates: who adjusts better to work and life in Japan?

In recent years knowledge management (KM) has received increased attention from academics and practitioners. There are several challenges to establishing KM as a separate discipline one of the most central being conceptual plurality. The purpose of this paper is to review and position 20 of the most frequently cited KM articles in management journals. More specifically, this paper classifies the KM publications on the subjectivity‐objectivity continuum, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the publications drawing from positivism and interpretative philosophies, and further discusses the challenges in KM, and how objectivity and subjectivity can be used to provide both product and process orientations in future research. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Objectivity and subjectivity in knowledge management: a review of 20 top articles

This study examines determinants of expatriate cross-cultural adjustment related to non-work- (interaction and general living adjustment) and work- (work adjustment and job satisfaction) aspects in Japan. It was hypothesized that cultural distance and expatriate gender, language proficiency, type (organizational or self-initiated expatriates), and stable personality traits (social initiative, emotional stability, cultural empathy, flexibility, and open-mindedness) have an influence on both non-work- and work-related adjustment. Hierarchical regression analyses, performed on data from 110 expatriates, indicate that expatriate language proficiency, type, and the personality traits of emotional stability and cultural empathy have a positive influence on both types of adjustment. Implications of these findings for practice are discussed.

Cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates in Japan

The literature on transactive memory (TM) continues to grow in several interrelated scholarly fields. Although this increased interest in TM systems has been beneficial, it has also led to a plural...

Transactive Memory Systems

Reflecting on recent trends in the international labor force, this study investigates and compares organizational expatriates (OEs), who are dispatched by their companies to international posts, with self-initiated expatriates (SIEs), who by their own volition move and work abroad. Findings from a survey of 57 OEs and 124 SIEs in Tokyo show several differences in individual- and job-related factors, cross-cultural adjustment and job satisfaction between OEs and SIEs. More specifically, mediation analyses show SIEs to have higher interaction adjustment because of their longer stay in the host country and higher host-country language proficiency. However, SIEs have lower job satisfaction because they work more often under host-country national supervisors.

Vesa Peltokorpi

Papers

Organizational expatriates and self-initiated expatriates: who adjusts better to work and life in Japan?

Objectivity and subjectivity in knowledge management: a review of 20 top articles

Cross-cultural adjustment of expatriates in Japan

Transactive Memory Systems

Organizational expatriates and self-initiated expatriates: Differences in cross-cultural adjustment and job satisfaction