Journal of Japanese Studies 

Abstract: Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American practices. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the post-war period - a success it is useful to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance. Gerlach focuses on what he calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the "keiretsu", or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses. Gerlach casts his net widely. He not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but he also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists and other social scientists, he argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic and social forces as traditional Western economic institutions such as the public corporation and the stock market. Most compellingly, "Alliance Capitalism" raises important questions about the best method of exchange in any economy. It identifies situations where cooperation among companies is an effective way of channelling corporate activities in a world marked by complexity and rapid change, and considers in detail alternatives to hostile takeovers and other characteristic features of American capitalism. The book also points to the broader challenges facing Japan and its trading partners as they seek to coordinate their distinctive forms of economic organization.

Abstract: Ideology played a momentous role in modern Japanese history. Not only did the elite of imperial Japan (1890-1945) work hard to influence the people to "yield as the grasses before the wind," but historians of modern Japan later identified these efforts as one of the underlying pathologies of World War II. Available for the first time in paperback, this study examines how this ideology evolved. Carol Gluck argues that the process of formulating and communicating new national values was less consistent than is usually supposed. By immersing the reader in the talk and thought of the late Meiji period, Professor Gluck recreates the diversity of ideological discourse experienced by Japanese of the time. The result is a new interpretation of the views of politics and the nation in imperial Japan.

Abstract: The Japanese firm as a system of attributes, Aoki learning and incentive systems in Japanese industry, Koike different quality paradigms and their implications for organizational learning, Cole training, productivity and quality control in Japanese multinational companies, Sako co-ordination between production and distribution in a globalizing network of firms, Asanuma the evolution of Japan's industrial research and development, Westney R&D organization in Japanese and American semi-condutor firms, Okimoto and Nishi SME's, entry barriers, and "strategic alliances", Whittaker Japanese human resource management for the viewpoint of incentive theory, Itoh co-ordination, specialization, and incentives in product development organization, Itoh the economic role of corporate grouping and the main bank system, Hoshi interlocking shareholdings and corporate governance in Japan the Japanese firm under the wartime planned economy, Okazaki equality-efficiency trade-offs - Japanese perceptions and choices, Dore