Decision-Making & Japan

A Study of Corporate Japanese Decision-Making and Its Relevance to Western Companies

Ruth Taplin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134242856
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Demonstrates that Western individualism and Japanese groupism are not necessarily incompatible or mutually exclusive.

Chapter One
Differing Cultural Assumptions

TO UNDERSTAND the roots or both Japanese and what we call Anglo-American corporate decision-making we must examine the basic cultural assumptions and theoretical underpinnings that condition such decision-making. An assumptive value, and especially a cultural assumptive value, is related to the belief or value system that basically is accepted by society at large. Most people simply take for granted that certain beliefs or values are part of their culture, are real and therefore do not question them. This tendency builds over hundreds of years of generational modifications and then becomes the real world based on historical evolution. Therefore, if we look at the differences in assumptive worlds between Japan and Anglo-American countries, representing the English-speaking world, we find that there are a number of basic assumptions that are culturally specific, and if we look at the theoretical framework in which to lodge this explanation we will then uncover the background to the present decision-making processes that are embodied in the large Japanese corporations.

Universal vs. Cultural

Hilb¹ noted that when dealing with cross-cultural transfer, it is imperative to distinguish between those societal elements that are culturally rooted which are not susceptible to transfer and universal characteristics that are culturally transmutable. For a Japanese theorist who relates it to this debate or divide between what are universal characteristics that may be transferred to other cultures and which are culturally specific, we may look at the writings of Ishii² who has identified five possible transferable Japanese management ideologies. He believes these lend themselves to universal implementation because they are based to some degree on features that may be found in all societies. On the other hand, he also notes five non-transferable sociocultural traits that he would argue are indigenous to Japanese society. Using this as a background for our theoretical framework, the following transferable and nontransferable features, described by Ishii, are outlined below.

The five transferable features are: (1) a humanistic approach towards employees; (2) a form of egalitarianism in terms of class background and the position held; (3) enlargement of job specifications rather than demarcation; (4) a style of worker participation in management that rests on the suggestion system, and (5) the possibility of secure employment. Tanner and Ouichi³ argue in their well-known series of books that American corporations in particular have a tendency to adopt these management techniques (although not always with the intended result). This will be discussed later when we look at some of the American semiconductor firms in Malaysia and compare them with the newly-established Japanese semiconductor companies.

The four non-transferable elements identified by Ishii, which are culturally rooted in Japanese society are: (1) group consciousness, corporate or collective consciousness, with ideas such as corporate profit equalling individual merit; (2) a form of vertically-based egalitarianism that rests on ranking — the year of service, for example, is of greater importance than actual performance; (3) a flexible structure coupled with responsibility which may be described, calling on Ronald Dore's term,⁴ as 'flexible rigidity'; (4) labour relations viewed in terms of a corporate union with a united purpose which is linked to the idea of a single union.

However, not everybody agrees that there is anything unique about Japanese management or Japan. In fact, Sugimoto and Moer⁵ as well as Dale⁶, argue against the myth of Japanese uniqueness. In this book, however, based on the material we have collected, we will take the middle ground, viewing some features as unique and others as universal traits. We intend to assess the differences between Anglo-American and Japanese processes of management decision-making so that we may see what fusion has already taken place and what may occur in the future.

Differences in Basic Assumptions

Let us begin the comparison and contrast of basic assumptive roles looking at the cultural differences between Japan and the Western world. First, let us assess the issue of land. Land in Japan had traditionally been a resource which everyone was able to use and the rights of the user were historically greater than that of the landowner. In the Western world, the right of the landowner or property owner is greater than that of the user and land has no reverential meaning as ancestor-related worship. It is basically a commodity to be used for some form of gain or profit

If we look at profit, in a Japanese company it is perceived as a long-term goal, whereas for a Western company it is a very short-term goal. The Japanese tend to emphasize market share rather than profit per se. They see that building a market share will eventually lead to a stable secure market whereby they will have a secure long-term source of income. In the Anglo-American company, profit maximization tends to be very short-term, concentrating on what profits may be gained in the present time. This is related to how managerial strategies are organized in terms of gaining results. In the Japanese case, the results are most important and that is what one will finally be judged by. In the Anglo-American world the most important criterion is how the game is played or how the results are achieved and although the results are of great importance, it is always the case that the end never really justifies the means.

The difference in this type of attitude can be seen perhaps in the way the Japanese turn a blind eye towards certain forms of corruption by successful companies. We will discuss further on why some practices that are considered to be corrupt in the Japanese business world are not considered to be corrupt in the Anglo-American corporate world and vice-versa.

Power and Psychological Dependence

The idea of how one gains results is also related, of course, to ideas of power. In the Japanese way of thinking, power comes with responsibility, with the top of the hierarchy holding power, but the contribution of the mass of society to economic success is acknowledged. Tremendous obligatory pressure is placed on Japanese company members to be successful. In many ways, one could say that Japan still runs on a quasi-feudal basis. On the other hand, however, the Anglo-American attitude to power is linked to the ideology of democracy, in which everyone has the opportunity to participate in both power-making decisions and the acquisition of power. Should people object to the way government is organized then they will band together and remove those people in whom they have invested power through exercising their franchise. This, of course, is linked to how ideas of legislating or law are organized in the Japanese and the Western world.

In the Japanese assumptive world, trust is basically invested in groups of individuals and the main way of organizing in society has to do with exercising social consensus. Social consensus which brings social control, therefore, is an essential part of Japanese society that may be gained through compromise and negotiation. Harmony is always striven for rather than conflict, which has caused a social law that is based on social relationships rather than impersonal state law to predominate. In Western terms, people are not trusted because the assumption is that all individuals are concerned for themselves and if that causes conflict and one person's interest subsumes that of another, then that is simply world reality, or the 'laws of nature'. Laws, therefore, have to be rigorously enforced to prevent people pursuing their own individual interests at the expense of the rest of society. Of course this begs the question of how social consensus is to be reached.

In the Japanese case, there are many mechanisms that persuade people to conform and to strive towards harmonious relationships. Some of these ideas involve psychological dependence, learned at a very early age, called amae (psychological dependence) and ideas of ninjo (loyalty) and giri (obligation) which deal with obligation, loyalty and friendship. Ideas that the safety of the individual can only be guaranteed by belonging to a group, that the group allows the individual to be safe and secure beginning with a family and then with the corporation, are normative to Japan. The corporation offers job security, and patrimonial relations between the higher and lower levels of the organization. There exists an understood assumption that the employees in a big corporation will be cared for and therefore will be safe as long as they work hard in harmony with the rest of the group and try not to disrupt the stability of the organization.

In the Western world, institutionalized religion, pop-group worship or alternative communities (e.g. 'travellers' and 'new age' people) provide a social structure or form of extended family network to soften the harshness of an individualistic society. One is not raised to be psychologically dependent. People are required to be independent and to look after themselves. In England, for example, this philosophy was taken to an extreme among the upper classes, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the way private boarding schools were run.

Related to group loyalty that is an integral part of group interdependence and consciousness is the psycho-socialization concept of amae as described by Doi, one of the few well-known Japanese psychologists. Amae, as Doi notes, is in its essence not a psychological concept particular to Japanese society. It may also be linked to Freud's assessment of a human being's earliest emotional attachment which is the path of dependent love experienced by an infant for its first object choice (usually its mother or other nurturer). It is a self-centred, self-indulgent love in which the child and later the adult feels he or she is free to act childishly or self-indulgently with someone that he or she trusts or depends on to some extent, knowing that his or her trust in behaving in this way will be supported and not betrayed.

However, In Japanese society, this tendency is much more evident in relation to the age-old ethical concept of social obligation, giri, and human feeling or feelings of loyalty and trust between two individuals (usually not of the same ranking) or ninjo; or as Doi states, 'one replaces amae by the more abstract term dependence and say that ninjo welcomes dependence whereas giri binds human beings in a dependent relationship',⁷ The typ§ of Japanese society in the past in which giri and ninjo were the predominant ethical concepts might, without exaggeration, be described as a world pervaded by amae. It is this common understanding of dependence through the psycho-socialization process that makes such behaviour peculiar to Japanese society. Amae alone does not account solely for what is social organization particular to Japan. Rather the manifestations of this behaviour are basically a combination of traditional attitudes and psycho-socialization processes which, for example, depending on how this combination affects the dissemination of information and communication within a corporate organization provides the foundation for decision-making processes.

We may summarize, therefore, by saying that the Japanese decision-making processes are basically a combination of amae, group consciousness, egalitarianism with ranking, and the excessive need for harmony within society that is all founded on social obligation and loyalty (giri), which in turn make the social organization of Japan particular to itself. This is especially true, of course, if we look at how ranking and hierarchy were organized in the villages and the relationship between the peasants and landlords and government.

How the decision-making processes operate and, most especially, how informal communication predetermines formal public decision, leads us to the next primary nontransferable feature of Japanese culture which is basically a vertical egalitarianism based on ranking. This idea of vertical egalitarianism-based ranking is just one of the many contradictory features of Japanese society such as flexible rigidity where it would seem that one feature would cancel out the other. However, this is not the case because such contradictions tend to co-exist and in many cases work quite well in tandem. Such forms of contradictory processes in Japanese society which are manifested in its manner of decision-making is what we need to try and understand because it will help to give us a far more rigorous and full view of how decisions are actually reached within the corporate structures.

Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism in the peculiar Japanese context occurs within a vertical rather than horizontal framework of social relations. This may be seen historically in the development of the village community in which the vertical links up and down within the upper/lower hierarchical order of the local village group are pronounced at the expense of the horizontal links based on occupational affiliations across villages. The cohesion of the local village group is primary and everyone is allowed equal membership in that group but in a socially agreed, hierarchically-ranked order. The ranking order, which in Western society usually gives rise to class-based antagonisms and societal divisions, does not necessarily produce the same outcome in Japanese society. This was the case in the past because of the taxation pressure exerted by the centralized government led by Japan's most powerful warrior landlord family (Tokugawa) upon the peasants. The peasant stratum had little time for revolt because of the heavy demands of taxation and services made upon them by the government and the laws that prohibited mobility outside of one's own village or natal class.⁸

Logic

Related to the adaptability of contradictory thought is the pattern of reasoning itself. In the Japanese mind reasoning and ideas of intellectualizing often tend to be seen in terms of particular cases and not in terms of one particular principle that should apply to all cases; contradictions, therefore, may co-habit without great antagonism. Each case tends to be seen on its own terms and a judgement is made in that particular case. Therefore, much of the time there is no underlying principle that determines in a linear or logical fashion how decisions are arrived at; this is in contra-distinction to the Western way of thinking which derives from Aristotelian, Hebrew/Graeco/Roman thought which emphasizes categorization, logic and linear thought with the underlying principles that if one principle is set and enshrined in the culture then that principle should apply in every case to every person. Of course, there are certain exceptions but in general this is the idea that is followed. If, however, a certain principle is proved to be faulty, then the whole framework might have to be rethought or changed, but empirical evidence and abstract thought is basically integrally linked in the Western way of thinking....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Differing Cultural Assumptions
• Chapter Two How Decisions are Made
• Chapter Three Total Quality Management
• Chapter Four Japanese Management Working Practices
• Chapter Five Some Results of the Interviews
• Afterword
• Appendix: How Interviewing was conducted
• References
• Index