This paper analyses the processes through which Japanese managers at subsidiaries of Japanese multinational manufacturing firms in Thailand move their local staff toward their goal of "efficient, standardised production." First the paper describes the organisation of "Japanese manufacturing" as an ideal type which Japanese managers carry with them when posted abroad in tact. The paper then reports on the quality of the transfer to Thailand of several Japanese shopfloor techniques; that is, to what extent methods on the ground at Japanese firms in Thailand match the Japanese model. Here are found, and Japanese managers for that matter acknowledge, significant gaps between model and practice. The paper then turns to an examination of communication patterns between higher level Thai managers and the Japanese. It argues that structural pressures at this critical point of cross-cultural interchange are important to the shopfloor findings and that responsibility for intra-organizational communications overwhelmingly falls onto Thai managers. The remainder of the paper is devoted to explanations the Japanese have generated for themselves for their day-to-day experience of the gaps between model and practice in Thai subsidiaries. It is hoped that this unorthodox explanatory vehicle will provide insight into the cultural "mélanges" taking place in overseas subsidiaries of multinational corporations today - including the challenge of cross-cultural dynamics as an central aspect of an overseas posting for managers of multinational firms - and therefore an engaging means of appraising the future of the very significant influences of Japanese manufacturing on Thailand, as well as in other countries.
Offshore manufacturing, in combination with world wide investment in capital and real estate markets, can be marked as one of the significant indicators of Japan's economic structural adjustment in the late 1980s following the 1985 revaluation of the yen. Investment in the U.S. made up the most significant proportion of total Japanese foreign direct investment in all sectors in this period. And it was relatively smoothly absorbed by the U.S.'s giant economy. By contrast Japanese investment in South East Asia, especially Thailand and Malaysia, focused on manufacturing. The structural impact on these nations' economies and societies was enormous. At the end of the 1980s, when Thailand had the fastest growing economy in the world, Japanese investment alone accounted for 25-40% of annual growth. Change in Greater Bangkok's urban landscape was palpable, as was change in its socio-scape. Thus, a farm labourer in Northeast Thailand on Tuesday was on the assembly line at Mazda in suburban Bangkok on Thursday. And he was now working within the Japanese production system for Japanese managers whose management techniques are, naturally, Japanese. It is this interplay between Japanese management and the Thai environment, onto which it has been grafted, that is the focus of this paper.
This paper analyses the processes by which Japanese manufacturers move their local Thai staff toward efficient, standardised production. It is organised as follows. First I describe the organisation of "Japanese manufacturing" as an ideal type and argue that Japanese managers carry it with them abroad in tact. I report on the quality of the transfer to Thailand of several Japanese shopfloor techniques; that is, to what extent methods now on the ground at Japanese firms in Thailand match the Japanese model. Here are found, and the Japanese for that matter acknowledge, significant gaps between model and practice. The paper then turns to an examination of communication patterns between higher level Thai managers and the Japanese. I argue that structural pressures at this critical point of cross-cultural interchange are important to the shopfloor findings and that responsibility for intra-organizational communications overwhelmingly falls onto Thai managers. The rest of the paper is devoted to explanations the Japanese have generated for themselves for their day-to-day experience of the gaps between model and practice in Thai subsidiaries. It is hoped that this unorthodox vehicle will provide some insight into the cultural "mélanges" taking place in overseas subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) today - including cross-cultural dynamics as an important aspect of an overseas posting for Japanese managers - and therefore an engaging means of appraising the future of the very significant influences of Japanese manufacturing on Thailand, and perhaps by implication elsewhere.
Fieldwork for this study began with a 10 month assessment of the broad set of linkages between Japanese headquarters and Thai subsidiaries from home offices of multinationals in Japan. This paper however is essentially based on a subsequent analysis of the management of 15 effectively wholly-owned multinational subsidiary manufacturers, predominately Japanese companies, in Thailand. Among these I conducted detailed ethnographic fieldwork at a consumer electronics plant, which assembled audio and video cassettes, and an automobile manufacturer, for 10 and 7 months respectively. Thai staff outnumbered Japanese managers 400:7 and 600:12 in these factories, though temporary Japanese "advisors" were also often present. Both plants had been manufacturing in Thailand for around five years at the time of the study. In addition, for periods ranging from several days to six weeks, data was gathered at the 13 other plants which differed from the reference plants in one parameter: same product but earlier establishment in Thailand, manufacture of a different product by same parent multinational, same product but Western parent, etc.
Japanese Manufacturing: Concepts and Activities
Organisational style in "Japanese manufacturing" stresses task flexibility and dependency between organisational segments of the manufacturing process. The system is based on strong information flows throughout the organisational hierarchy generated by a work force capable of communicating efficiently and accurately. Ideally the system devolves authority - over a limited sphere of activities - down to lower levels than would be the case in a traditional Western manufacturing model. Thus workers, who are generally highly trained, appear to have a high degree of autonomy over their specific tasks while at the same time pushing a great deal of information about those tasks into the system.
The potential organisational dynamism of Japanese manufacturing can be appreciated conceptually by contrasting it with "fordism," which is associated with traditional Western manufacturing, and has by now become the bete noir of industrial organisation. Under fordism a worker is said to have been "atomized." That is, he is defined as an input (like a machine or a raw material) to mass production, repetitively performing a simple and specified task without knowledge of the relationship of his work to either the product produced or, perhaps, to the overall organisation itself. Fordism recreates management-labour divisions by continuously reiterating the distinctions between managers, who design and decide (they think) while labour only operationalises (they do). It is perhaps this diminution of the value, or potentiality, of the human factor in "labour" that has made fordism noxious to analysts of industrial organisation at the end of the 20th century, and perhaps to some industrialists. In any case by the mid-1970s many Western industries were organisationally cumbersome and were not "working;" they were losing money. Western consumer goods industries in particular declined one after the other in the face of Japanese competition. Interest in the Japanese model by Western industry has therefore been a multi-facetted affair influenced both by competition and general attitudes in Western societies. The "Japanese manufacturing model" is thus a well travelled set of general ideas.
Recognising that models are analytical conveniences and that their boundaries are intrinsically soft and dependent on contextual factors, I argue that Japanese industrial managers carry with them a fairly stable "Japanese manufacturing model" that is based on hands-on experience and long term knowledge building. The currently fashionable term for describing such a phenomenon is to stress its "embeddedness." The model is, of course, most powerfully articulated within the organisational systems and histories of the firms to which managers are attached. In addition, many of the so-called "Japanese" management techniques - often renamed in non-Japanese contexts - have now become normative among manufacturers world-wide. This broad acknowledgement of the strengths of the Japanese model has reinforced the confidence of Japanese managers, especially at firms with strong manufacturing traditions such as the ones I studied. This process has also been encouraged by the Japanese media, where a vast array of publications target an avid audience of business managers and engineers. Japanese managers, then, carry to their overseas assignments a model of management that sits in a strong position within the public culture of Japan and the private cultures of their firms. In the hearts and minds of Japanese managers there is an understandable expectation that their home-grown, and internationally-praised, model should be perpetuated in the management of their company subsidiaries abroad.
Industrial managers do not spend a significant amount of time pondering either the contents or boundaries of models; they are relevant to the extent that they provide guidelines for action. Let us have a look then at some specific activities associated with Japanese management. The most convenient place to find readily observable action is on the shopfloor itself. However it should be noted that going to the shopfloor for examples in no way privileges them as the most significant activities in a factory setting. (Indeed I will spend some time in this paper discussing the relevance of communication patterns at some distance from the shopfloor.) In any case, here let me explain simply and non-technically some common Japanese shopfloor techniques and see to what extent conditions observed at Japanese managed plants in Thailand match the model derived from the domestic context in Japan.
In industrial production "quality control" (QC) has a huge breadth of potential meanings. The activity most closely tied with quality control in Japan is QC CIRCLES. These are small group activities in which, typically, assembly line workers share ideas about how to solve minor problems on their lines. Ideas are tested by gathering data from the line that can be analysed using simple statistical measures. "Circles" are based on the intuitive logic that a worker who is thinking while he is doing can make valuable suggestions regarding how work can be conducted more productively. As such QC circles constitute perhaps the best known operationalisation of non-fordist manufacturing concepts. In the process of participating in circles, workers are assumed to become more interested in their jobs and more committed to their colleagues and the company. While there are of course variations in Japan, QC circles tend to meet regularly once or twice a week near the shopfloor, after work, for 30-40 minutes. Workers are not paid for their participation. -- In Thai plants, QC circles were conducted under overtime pay conditions. In many plants they were dropped altogether, or were never present, because of heavy production deadlines. In all plants with active QC circles comparatively rudimentary analytical tools were utilised to identify the sources of production difficulties.
Through JOB ROTATION a typical worker at a large firm, who is likely to spend his entire working career in that firm, will change tasks and learn new skills such that he will eventually have worked on, or managed the work of, a number of lines or task areas. Over the course of his career his broad, hands-on knowledge of the factory will make him a more competent manager. In my view job rotation goes hand in hand conceptually with ON THE JOB TRAINING (OJT), thus forming a system in which workers in Japan are given responsibility for quickly learning new tasks on a functioning line - where mistakes immediately affect output - under the tutelage of an individual or group of experienced co-workers. Awareness of the effect on all line members of a worker's failure to quickly learn new tasks is deliberately used to motivate new line members. It should be recognised that in Japan the basic skills that even new recruits bring to the factory generally surpass other industrialized countries.
In Thailand I observed almost no cases of JOB ROTATION among workers in the factories I studied. Thai workers were reluctant to change tasks, both because they interpreted it as an indication that they were judged incompetent in their current jobs and they did not want to separate themselves from the social relationships they had established with their co-workers. Japanese managers were satisfied with this arrangement as it generated stability on the production line and did not require that they retrain workers for new tasks. The calculation by Japanese managers on how intensively to rotate Thai engineers was based essentially on whether it was best to spread out limited engineering manpower by frequent rotation or keep good engineers focused on tasks they could manage consistently. The latter option was viewed as safer and overwhelmingly prevailed. ON THE JOB TRAINING, meanwhile, overwhelmingly predominated in Thai factories. However this was explained in interviews with Japanese managers as a response to high demand for output. Managers were also careful to ease new workers onto lines so that mistakes could be more tightly controlled. They felt that Thai workers had plenty of potential but were inexperienced and poorly trained. As a result, in addition to OJT, limited classroom work on assembly in the automobile plant was conducted by Japanese foremen flown in from Japan with a Thai manager translating. With materials in Japanese or English, the experience was frustrating for all involved. In the consumer electronics plant, manuals had been translated into Thai, and Thai engineers conducted some training. However, they were insecure in their knowledge of Japanese methods, a topic I will explore below.
MUDA-DORI (time and resource management) is highly valued among Japanese manufacturers as a general paradigm under which waste, defined both in physical terms and in terms of time, is cut out of the production process. It includes JUST-IN-TIME (JIT) delivery of parts by both external and in-house suppliers. In Thailand, plant lay-out reflected the scheme, e.g. every tool, machine, and supply bin was positioned in a designated spot so it could be used most efficiently in the production process. However, complex measures were avoided. For example, the application of more than simple calculations to straight measurements in order to identify waste or "noise" on production lines - a common muda-dori activity within QC circles in Japan - was avoided. (Waste reduction on the lines in Thailand was the responsibility of production engineers, as in traditional Western systems.) The notion of earlier segments of the production line creating products for their "customers" further along in the production process was poorly developed. Just-in-time delivery by outside suppliers, even Japanese-owned suppliers, was not attempted. Indeed, Japanese managers joked among themselves that one Japanese automobile assembler had a year's worth of supplies stockpiled on its huge lot.
Viewed as a whole, the combination of intense production pressures, human and physical resources on the ground, and strict quality requirements on all products that leave the factory have generated a set of shopfloor manufacturing methods in Thailand that are very different from the Japanese model. It should be acknowledged however that the two plants I studied in-depth were start-ups, in operation for around five years, with a largely inexperienced labour force. As such we would want to know the experience of Japanese plants in Thailand that had been operating far longer. Among my case studies is included a Japanese subsidiary that had been manufacturing motor vehicles in Thailand for over 30 years. Whereas the average age of workers in the start-ups was 24 years, in the older plant the majority of workers "grew up with the company;" they had joined young and stayed, averaging 37 years of age. The observation of serious limits on the extensiveness of "Japanese management techniques" was consistent in this older plant (and others) with an experienced labour force. The president of this company told me that, try as he had, he simply could not get these systems in place in Thailand to any degree that approached their use in Japan. In the following section we shall explore why this might be the case.
The Sociology of Communications in Technical Transfers
At the outset let us make a distinction between two potential situations that might be called "successes" in implanting Japanese shopfloor systems outside of Japan. One is a success as an exact copy - technically, organisationally and socially - of a Japanese system; the other a success technically, including an extensive, but socially distinctive, information flow. The former "copy" success, I would argue, has virtually no probability of realisation in the real world; that is, French workers do not become Japanese workers when they work at a Japanese plant. And if they cannot become Japanese they cannot work in the same way. The latter success, technically successful by working in a different way via a distinctive local sociology, does appear to exist at some Japanese firms abroad. However in the case of Thailand, to recap, neither of these successes is in evidence.
Interactions between local staff and their Japanese managers are an important source of explanation for limitations on the recreation of Japanese shopfloor techniques in Thai subsidiaries. Expatriates at subsidiaries of MNCs manufacturing abroad are proportionately few in number - and some occupy "advisor" positions on the margins of factory organisational charts - but they are in the highest positions of authority in these firms. They ordinarily spend little time on the shopfloor itself, relying on their higher-ranking local colleagues to carry managerial decisions and information forward and keep it consistent as it moves through the organisational structure. It should be noted that information about what is to be transferred down the hierarchy is making its most critical cross-cultural leap in the communications between expatriate and top local managers. This may be the most important structural point in the managerial technology transfer process. That is, the capacity of local and expatriate personnel, typically at an upper level, to share information strongly affects the development of capabilities among lower level, local staff to successfully handle technology closer to the production line.
Thus, I considered evidence of "insecurity" or "under-confidence" over technical matters among Thai managers and engineers in Japanese firms as extremely significant. It contrasted with my knowledge of conditions among managers and, especially, engineers in Japan and my understanding, based on interviews with Thai managers and the statements of Japanese managers, that Thai engineers in the plants I studied were generally competent.
How would these "insecurities" be explained? My findings suggest that Japanese engineers controlled decisions that their Thai colleagues were - technically speaking - capable of making, thus preventing them from gaining experience and confidence in specific tasks. Supporting evidence comes in the form of a simple arithmetic of expatriate personnel, in this case from micro-chip manufacturers. Japanese chip manufacturers in Thailand typically have three to four times the number of expatriate engineers as their Western counterparts using similar technologies in similar scale plants. Japanese engineers are deeply involved in controlling engineering tasks in Thailand. How can we explain this apparently distinctive way of organising the management of engineering tasks in overseas subsidiaries?
Let us consider the social characteristics observed in Japanese manufacturing at home in Japan. Important among these are long-term commitment by employees to the firm as much more than a "workplace" in the Western sense, with overlapping responsibilities and dependence on extremely dense informational networks facilitating a remarkable flow of information both up and down vertical organisational hierarchies and, ideally, across horizontal organisational functions as well. These characteristics have worked well in domestic manufacturing in post-war Japan, and as discussed above they thereby encourage an expectation of similarly dense information flows by Japanese managers in subsidiaries abroad. But such flows appear to be arduous to recreate abroad as they may depend on similar backgrounds and assumptions about social interactions. (This may explain, among other things, the common observation that penetration of Japanese organisations by non-Japanese, even those who speak Japanese fluently, is difficult.) Poor information flows are likely, in turn, to increase the desire of Japanese managers abroad to keep decision-making under their control and to fine tune the work of their foreign colleagues. In practice this encourages the presence of large numbers of Japanese expatriates.
It has been suggested by some Japanese managers and observers that the higher density of interactions between Japanese engineers on-site and their Thai counterparts encourages technology transfer by multiplying the contacts between teacher and pupil. While in theory this may be true, there appears to be some evidence that "understanding" why a task needs to take place may be confounded with "carrying out an order." Japanese managers obviously know, as a matter of principle underlying Japanese-style manufacturing, that a staff member is made more capable by understanding, for example, the impact of a particular task on a flow of tasks, rather than turning screw 5 at time X, or the chemical implications of mixing an element with another at a specific temperature, rather than merely being sure that A is at 89-91 degrees centigrade when mixed with B. The issue is that understanding and learning take place within culturally specified frames. The Japanese often seem to project meaning from a Japanese context onto the Thai frame.
For example, in Japan a highly trained and experienced worker responsible for maintaining robots on the shopfloor will verbally report to his superior the successful completion of a purely routine repair. A record of this repair appears on the maintenance worker's daily report, which is perused by his supervisor, analysed by a production manager, and becomes a permanent record. The verbal report to the supervisor of the repair has no instrumental effect on production output for the day, but is loaded with meaning. It is a statement both about a hierarchical relationship (respect for authority) as well as co-participation (equality) vis-a-vis responsibility to work for the success of the firm. In an extreme example of this transcendence of hierarchical relations through joint commitment, I once observed a Japanese maintenance engineer describing to a robot the tasks he was performing upon it.
In my experience, Thais working in manufacturing settings find the notion of anthropomorphizing a machine ludicrous and efforts to transcend hierarchy, such as appealing to joint participation toward abstract goals, threatening and disruptive. In a Thai factory managed by Thais, a supervisor circulating on the shopfloor or a subordinate verbally reporting when written reports are the norm, means only one thing: trouble. Thus a Japanese engineer may think he is "transferring knowledge" through the projected kinship of joint participation in the slog of relatively routine activities of a Thai maintenance engineer. However, unless the Thai has learned to consider the act otherwise, before they have together turned the first screw this action indicates to the Thai that he is incompetent and unable to do the job independently, e.g. without interference and "in his own way" (thaam kao eng) as may be befitting his position in the Thai social context. In fact any Thai maintenance engineer who has regular contact with the Japanese is likely to be of relatively high rank and, through experience with the Japanese, is likely to appreciate the intentions of his Japanese colleagues. His reticence however would remain for he must consider that his Thai subordinates "on the line" would consider it a demonstration that the Japanese manager did not respect the Thai engineer's knowledge. His day-to-day authority over his Thai subordinates, a matter of critical importance based around the notion of respect in the Thai social context, may be threatened.
In effect, through the best intentions of a Japanese manager to assist a local colleague in the most committed way he knows how, a Thai manager may find himself in a cross-cultural double bind which exponentially complicates the classic problems of the middle manager. On the one hand the Thai manager has likely gained a position that puts him in direct contact with the Japanese due to his educational background, technical know-how and/or skills in understanding the Japanese. However his lower relative hierarchical position restrains him from suggesting that the Japanese work differently. On the other hand, vis-a-vis his local subordinates he is victim of his own success, obliged to conduct himself in ways with the Japanese that may undermine his authority by local cultural standards. In addition to the structural strains they experience as middle managers then, we can recognise here the considerable pressures on local managers as cultural brokers in Japanese firms. Of course in the real world, it is the manager who successfully copes with binds of this kind who succeeds. Perhaps he can help members of his own staff gain respect for different ways of working, or get close enough to a Japanese manager to help him to understand how some of his customary ways of working backfire in the Thai context.
How We Explain to Ourselves
The question arises at this point to explain why the onus of this cultural brokering may be part of the Thai manager's unwritten job description, seldom falling to the Japanese expatriate. The answer may be tossed away with a simple recognition of the relatively short period that the Japanese have been manufacturing in Thailand (thus suggesting that over time they will learn to work better) or a discussion of weak training programs in Japanese multinational corporations for their foreign-bound staff. We might critique the Japanese Ministry of Education's foreign language training programs, or conduct a dissection of uchi-soto (insider - outsider) relations in Japanese social structure and its implications on behaviour in foreign contexts. These are only a few of the potential subjects implicated by mundane findings in Japanese-owned factories in the suburbs of Bangkok.
However, rather than settling for the facile or risking to entangle the span of Japan's social universe, it might be more interesting to ask what explanations the Japanese generate for themselves for gaps between model and practice at subsidiaries of Japanese multinationals in Thailand. The basis of this commentary is not a survey but my own participation with Japanese managers in the successes and frustrations of months of on-duty and off-duty activities, backed by open-ended interviews. The explanations start, shall we say, on the ground with the technical/material and move to higher levels of abstraction. Needless to say it is in these latter categories that my interpretations play a more significant role both in pushing explanations that I attribute to the Japanese toward an internal logic or in attempting to explain how logical ambiguities can make sense in particular contexts.
According to Japanese managers in Thailand there are two fundamental facts about the production of goods around which all other organisational activities are built. The first is that within agreed specifications a high quality final product will be maintained. The second is very high production pressure. Among industrial managers the desire for efficiency lies in the same conceptual package as the idea of production; nowhere more so than among Japanese manufacturers. In the case of production in Thailand large scale investments have recently been made. Japanese managers describe the reasoning behind such investments with phrases such as, "If you aren't in the market someone else has taken your place." Naturally headquarters wants to recoup those investments as soon as possible. Moreover, since Thai and other local markets were expanding extremely rapidly at the time of this study, it was felt that this could be achieved. Although due to the demise of the Thai economy from mid-1997 the local market has now changed dramatically, at the automobile firm where I conducted in-depth research, for example, a car ordered would be delivered around six months later. In other words every car that could be made would sell immediately. It is not surprising that pressures from Tokyo to speed-up production were enormous.
Accordingly these "facts" constrain the possibilities of training and rotation upon which Japanese shopfloor techniques are based. How so? Avoiding rotation may help maintain quality by keeping workers at familiar tasks where they make fewer errors. Meanwhile training workers is "expensive" (takai) in that it takes them off the line. It is "difficult" (muzakashii) because new teaching materials must be produced to cope with the Thai language or, even without new materials, due to a lower level of basic education, and also basic skills, among Thai workers compared with new Japanese workers. Holding Thai workers to one job means they are trained once for that job and usually on the line itself.
One of the basic tenets of Japanese manufacturing is the dismantling of post production inspection in order to force quality control into each step of production. When achieved, by definition fewer faulty products reach final inspection; an expensive and time consuming cycle in production. In Thailand low wages made available the option of extensive post-production inspection and repair of products that were out of specification. The fact that most Japanese techniques were not integrated into production made it necessary.
In addition Japanese managers felt that time and money devoted to rotations and training often went to waste because of job hopping, especially once new skills were learned. Job hopping was a focus of attention at all of the Japanese firms I studied. Virtually all of the Japanese worked under a tenable assumption of employment at least through the age of retirement (55 years of age), so-called "lifetime" employment, at "their" firms. It was a matter of incredulity that Thai employees had different expectations or desires for their career course. (Interestingly, even though job hopping might be used to explain reticence to train or rotate it was, according to evidence readily at hand for Japanese managers, relatively rare among lower level workers, who are the target for shopfloor programs. Middle and upper level Thai managers, especially engineers, job hopped often in a market in which their skills were at a premium. Japanese managers thus projected onto lower level workers the job hopping tendencies they observed with consternation among their organisationally-closer, and personally-known, Thai colleagues.) Job hopping was, thus, a cause of great disappointment to Japanese managers; a breaking of the trust that comes from jointly working for their company, to which "natural" collegial devotion to one another is linked. As a result job hopping made investments in training more difficult to justify.
There is then the question of the soil within which the Japanese system may or may not be implanted or taught and the approach taken in undertaking this task. Thailand is considered a largely agrarian economy that has not evolved through the industrial stage of development. Unlike conditions at subsidiaries in North America or Western Europe there is no need for Japanese companies to work with or against systems of industrial organisation already in place. To link this with an earlier discussion, if the Japanese set up or buy out a factory in the American Midwest they will consider that they will now be hiring workers with an industrial consciousness. As such they must take as a matter of course that they will have to work with, or against, practices strongly influenced by fordist traditions. From the Japanese point of view, however, Thai organisational culture as it stands need not be scrutinised since it has not yet been rationalised appropriately to fit modern industrial standards. Since many of those standards are now "Japanese" it is seen as all the more appropriate that much of the rationalisation process should follow a familiar Japanese path. In effect Japanese managers' perceptions of their Thai colleagues' industrial capacities are embedded in generalised Japanese perceptions of Thailand as an underdeveloped South East Asian state.
Japanese managers pay some attention to what might be called in an earlier academic era the "national character" of the Thais. However there appears to be little interest in moving beyond generalised individual Thai behavioural traits toward conceptualising Thai organisational style, or the Thai nation-state, in more than purely comparative terms with their own. I would acknowledge that this would be an analytically sophisticated exercise; comparison, after all, as the vehicle for recognizing difference, is the natural starting point, and commonly the end point, of analysis. On the other hand, we might also acknowledge that postings abroad are extensive and complex experiences during which Japanese managers are confronted with Thais, Thai organisations, and Thailand over several years. And these experiences unfold in the complicated ways characteristic of the wide-ranging and substantial interactions of business and local environments. Indeed, Japanese managers' jobs and family lives require that they interact with Thai society and its institutions to a degree that makes most contemporary anthropological field experiences appear comparatively limited both temporally and in terms of the breadth of persons and subject matters entailed.
While Japanese industrial managers are not formally tooled-up for cross-cultural analysis, they are astute and creative, if perhaps overly abstract, conceptualisers of organisational and personal dynamics among themselves. (Such skills are important to successful careers that span decades in a single, large organisation.) By applying these same standards of observation and strategic interpersonal interaction to their new "partners in production" Japanese managers might relatively easily note that Thai organisational style has been quite distinctively developed in its village and bureaucratic settings. Particularly given that agrarian organisational metaphors readily inform Japanese managers' explanations of Japan's modern organisations, it is curious that Japanese managers in Thailand do not look to their home-grown model for explanations of Thai behaviour in modern organisational settings. Agrarian-precursors or otherwise, it appears that Japanese managers have the conceptual means readily at hand to re-think the organisation of work in their factories in Thailand, yet seemed to me uninterested in stepping back from day-to-day issues to do so.
Japanese managers in Thailand often say there are many key similarities in the ways they and the Thais organize themselves. Thais are seen to be keenly aware of, and spend a great deal of time considering, social relations. They are highly conscious of their status within, and the power of, the hierarchies in which they find themselves. Thais seek out networks of long term trust and consideration with other members of their organisation based on similarity of background, education, and co-experience of organisational life. While among academics, trust and commitment has tended to be conceptualized in an individual-individual logic for the Thais, while an individual-organisational form is favoured in describing Japanese social behaviour, my observations of Thais and Japanese in many settings largely concur with these comparative views by Japanese managers. Indeed there appears to be a great deal of overlap between Thai and Japanese social and organisational behaviour.
Thus, it might be argued logically that by stressing their own similarities with their Thai colleagues, Japanese managers could generate some sort of projected "kinship" with them - evidently something more potent than "membership in the same firm" is required - that might aid in coping with what my data from the shop floor shows, and what the Japanese know; that, indeed, Japanese factories in Thailand work differently from Japanese factories in Japan. Japanese managers however seem to focus on Thai forms of working and its distinction and difference from their own. They refrain from abstracting their observations of activities in their subsidiaries, re-assessing the assumptions of their own, favoured practices in light of such observations, and adjusting their conception of processes and goals to fit the local context. This is suggested by the following sort of statement, which I heard in so many words from so many Japanese managers. "Sure, we know that we're doing things differently here in the short run, but in 10-15 years this plant will be organized and will work just like its 'sister plant' in Japan." My data suggest that older Japanese plants in Thailand have not developed organisational in this way, and there is no ground for expecting "young" Japanese plants to develop differently. Japanese firms can produce goods anywhere in the world, but they cannot manufacture the sociality underlying the forms of work with which they are familiar in Japan.
"Mélanges": A Contemporary Anthropologist's Term for Cultural Relativity
Contemporary technologies move capital, people, things, and ideas at an increasingly frenetic pace. As the boundaries between communities become increasingly permeable, anthropologists are seeking ways of discussing mélanges as something characteristic of contemporary life. (Formerly) foreign objects are thus "domesticated" into local usage. As words already have been, ideas and images are now "creolized" and "pidginized". Thus, for example, I have argued that Japanese managers are missing something (possibly of value to them) by not imagining how they might mix their management culture with the - even if non-industrial - organisational culture that informs the work of their Thai employees.
Japanese managers however feel that as they are working in virgin industrial territory in terms of machines they are doing the same thing in terms of the organisation of social action. The Japanese management model, analysed here in terms of shopfloor activities and communication patterns, is thus deployed as a natural and unconscious consequence of Japanese investment in manufacturing abroad. Of especial interest is the apparent sanctity of these practices - "In 10-15 years this plant will work just like its 'sister plant' in Japan..." - in the face of highly suggestive evidence to the contrary that Japanese managers observe directly. This is a classic case of cognitive dissonance. Since the model may not be decentred an appropriate copy is projected onto a - better - future.
While the evidence as I see it suggests otherwise, there is an internal logic to the argument that over the long run by making their ways of working impermeable the Japanese will form their Thai organisations in the closest possible image of their own. (Their supporting argument would be that approaching the Thai work environment flexibly risks diluting the potential successes of their practices.) Of course the interpersonal tensions generated in sustained exercises of this kind are enormous, and they might be viewed as a kind of cross-cultural occupational hazard that forms a significant part of the already-stressful overseas assignments of most Japanese managers. Cross-cultural conflicts would seem to be an unavoidable side effect of the embeddedness of a very particular model of work guiding the practices of work of Japanese managers.
Are Japanese work practices in Thailand not a "mélange" then? Of course they are, as much of the evidence from the shop floor makes clear. But I would be the first to acknowledge that this depends on the observer's perspective. As a social scientist I see on the shop floor of a Japanese-owned factory in Thailand a place where, nearly-exclusively, Thais are working. It is essentially a Thai social and cognitive space influenced marginally by Japanese concepts concerning day-to-day working practices. Over time, with training and experience, these work practices may more closely mimic practices observed in Japan; it may become perhaps more "Thai-Japanese" than it is now. In all these present and future cases however, on the shop floor and in managers' meetings, it is and will be a mélange. A Japanese industrial engineer in Thailand, however, may perceive the overseas factory in this way, "It works poorly, it is not yet Japanese." Meanwhile, the relevant short run question from headquarters is not the extensiveness of matching models but extensiveness of profits.
In Conclusion
Historically the success of Japanese consumer goods manufacturers has depended on a set of management practices developed within Japan's distinctive set of social and political economic institutions. In an environment of intense domestic competition, successful Japanese firms organised themselves to put higher quality, cheaper products onto worldwide markets. In the process they deeply challenged competitors abroad (motor vehicles) or put them out of business (consumer electronics). Weaker domestic Japanese competitors either failed or, more often, were consolidated with firms capable of managing their resources more capably. In the long run Japanese management practices will remain these large and successful Japanese manufacturing firms' distinctive, and most important, resource.
This paper has described some of the features of the powerful organisational complex underpinning successful Japanese industrial firms. The Japanese management model tells us about sustained and wide ranging pan-organisational communication patterns engaging information about both the internal and external environments. Why bother to inform workers in an audio cassette factory of the collapse of prices in the European market? Because this will help them to understand why cost cutting measures on the shopfloor are necessary to the continued success of the company; and their jobs. Information, and training, on the move; up from the shopfloor, engaged with a broader external environment which is analysed with a maximum of information at hand, strategic decisions taken and initiatives re-filtered through the organisation; recycle. The best firms in the world now work in this way; and much of it is modelled on the exceptional communications structures that have been made inherent in successful Japanese manufacturing firms.
It is evident however that Japanese firms depend on an extensive cultural casing which bounds and lubricates their communications. In asking about the future successes of large Japanese firms in Thailand and by implication throughout South East Asia, we must finally, then, focus on communication. Thai middle managers are astute and practical. Those who stay with Japanese companies are handling their challenging communications responsibilities well. They will do so better in the future, to the benefit of themselves and their companies. Meanwhile, though there are some highly sensitive Japanese managers in Thailand, we have noted that the onus of cross-cultural broking overwhelmingly falls to these Thais. The Japanese will continue to make money in Thailand, as are other foreign investors. However, as long as the casing upon which Japanese firms seem to depend is not somehow loosened there will be nothing distinctive about their ways of working when they graft themselves onto places like Thailand. And no reason to think they will have any comparative advantage in the sphere at which they are known to excel; the development of "their" human resources.