The transfer of Japanese work practices to plants in Thailand

Abstract

This paper analyses two Japanese transplants that have been manufacturing products in Thailand for a number of years. The research shows that these transplants have not fully adopted three Japanese work practices that are characteristic of workplaces in Japan (the significant troubleshooting skills possessed by production workers, the production support work provided by assistant first-line supervisors and the overlapping roles of manufacturing engineers). The low wages and the subdivided job consciousness of Thai employees, the presence of Japanese expatriates who are not familiar with the workplace practices actually used in Japan and the fact that the transplants have manufactured standardized mature products that do not require high troubleshooting skills, are found to be the main causes for the incomplete transfer of work practices from the mother company.

Keywords:

• work practices
• transfers
• Thailand
• Japan

Acknowledgements

This research has received funding support from the Japan Economic Research Foundation, the Suntory Foundation, the Yokohama Academic Foundation and the Fukyukai. I wish to thank Harry C. Katz, Jan H. Katz, Sarosh Kuruvilla, Takeshi Thornton, Kazuo Koike, Hiroyuki Fujimura and people at the plants where I conducted my field research.

Notes

1. Abo (1994, 1998) insists that Japanese transplants represent a hybrid between Japanese and local elements.

2. Performance appraisals are used for blue-collar workers as well as white-collar employees at the T1 and T2 transplants in Thailand, like at the J1 and J2 plants in Japan. Evaluation elements for the blue-collar workers at the transplants are simpler than the elements for the workers at the mother plants. Japanese human resource managers at the T1 and T2 transplants point out that wage differentials based on the performance appraisal at the transplants are smaller than the wage differentials at the mother plants.

3. Although first-line supervisors are often regarded as key people in Japanese production workplaces (Dore 1973; Koike 1977, 1994), assistant first-line supervisors play more important roles at the J1 and J2 plants.

4. Nonaka (1988) stresses ‘middle-up-down’ decision making by middle managers in Japanese firms.

5. Seisan-gijutsu-sha (including seizo-gijutsu-sha) in Japanese is translated as manufacturing engineers in this article.

6. The job instruction programme is one of the training programmes that were introduced from the United States to Japan around 1950 (Shirai 1982).

7. Based on their research in Korea and Taiwan, Bae, Chen and Lawler (1998) point out that Japanese firms may be more sensitive to local contexts, in contrast to American firms, which export their human resource management systems to their subsidiary firms. There is further research on the transfer of Japanese production systems within Asia (Itagaki 1997; Nakamura 1999; Nakamura and Wicaksono 1999; Okamoto 1998).

8. Adler, Goldoftas and Levine (1998) analyse product model changes and manufacturing engineers' roles at NUMMI. Clark and Fujimoto (1991) and Fujimoto (1999) stress that the concurrent (simultaneous) engineering work involving manufacturing engineers is the strength of Japanese automobile firms. Appleyard and Brown (2001) find that engineers in the semiconductor industry play more important roles than operators and technicians.