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Japanese Industry in the American South is an anthropological case study that describes whole industrial cultures found in three Japanese industrial plants in the American South. This book searches for answers to these questions: Why are Japanese industries coming to the American South? To what extent does Japan industrial management in the American South replicate the industrial relations model used in the home plants in Japan? What are the reactions of Americans toward the Japanese expatriates? At the same time, the book looks at the profound impact that the Japanese have had on Southerners.
In 1955 the Fortune magazine list of America's largest corporations included just 18 with headquarters in the Southeast. By 2002 the number had grown to 123. In fact, the South attracted over half of the foreign businesses drawn to the United States in the 1990s. The eight original essays collected here consider this stunning dynamism in ways that help us see anew the region's place in that ever-accelerating, transnational flow of people, capital, and technology known collectively as "globalization." Moving between local and global perspectives, the essays discuss how once faraway places like Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent are now having an impact on the South. One essay, for example, looks at a range of issues behind the explosive growth of North Carolina's Latino population, which grew by almost 400 percent during the 1990s-miles ahead of the national growth percentage of 61. In another essay we learn why BMW workers in Germany, frustrated with the migration of jobs to South Carolina, refer to the American South as "our Mexico." Showing that global forces are often on both sides of the matchup--reshaping the South but also adapting to and exploiting its peculiarities--many of the essays make the point that, although the new ethnic food section at the local Winn-Dixie is one manifestation of globalization, so is the wide-ranging export of such originally southern phenomena as NASCAR and Kentucky Fried Chicken. If a single message emerges from the book, it is this: Beware of tidy accounts of worldwide integration. On one hand, globalization can play to southern shortcomings (think of the region's repute as a source of cheap labor); on the other, the influx of new peoples, customs, and ideas is poised to alter forever the South's historic black-white racial divide.
The focus of this book is on the Japanese economic bureaucracy, particularly on the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), as the leading state actor in the economy. Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter. The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century--energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth--involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.
Japan’s decision to attack the United States in 1941 is widely regarded as irrational to the point of suicidal. How could Japan hope to survive a war with, much less defeat, an enemy possessing an invulnerable homeland and an industrial base 10 times that of Japan? The Pacific War was one that Japan was always going to lose, so how does one explain Tokyo’s decision? Did the Japanese recognize the odds against them? Did they have a concept of victory, or at least of avoiding defeat? Or did the Japanese prefer a lost war to an unacceptable peace? Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at Japan’s decision for war, and concludes that it was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. He believes that Japanese aggression in East Asia was the root cause of the Pacific War, but argues that the road to war in 1941 was built on American as well as Japanese miscalculations and that both sides suffered from cultural ignorance and racial arrogance. Record finds that the Americans underestimated the role of fear and honor in Japanese calculations and overestimated the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a deterrent to war, whereas the Japanese underestimated the cohesion and resolve of an aroused American society and overestimated their own martial prowess as a means of defeating U.S. material superiority. He believes that the failure of deterrence was mutual, and that the descent of the United States and Japan into war contains lessons of great and continuing relevance to American foreign policy and defense decision-makers.
This insightful book explores the intense and ultimately fleeting moment in 1980s America when the future looked Japanese. Would Japan's remarkable post–World War II economic success enable the East Asian nation to overtake the United States? Or could Japan's globe-trotting corporations serve as a model for battered U.S. industries, pointing the way to a future of globalized commerce and culture? While popular films and literature recycled old anti-Asian imagery and crafted new ways of imagining the "yellow peril," and formal U.S.-Japan relations remained locked in a holding pattern of Cold War complacency, a remarkable shift was happening in countless local places throughout the United States: Japanese goods were remaking American consumer life and injecting contemporary globalization into U.S. commerce and culture. What impact did the flood of billions of Japanese things have on the ways Americans produced, consumed, and thought about their place in the world? From autoworkers to anime fans, Consuming Japan introduces new unorthodox actors into foreign-relations history, demonstrating how the flow of all things Japanese contributed to the globalizing of America in the late twentieth century.
This book examines, in rigorous, quantitative detail, the structure of trade between Japan and the United States, tracing the evolution of trade interdependence and the causes of its increasing intensity. It also looks at sectoral differences in interdependence--at the patterns behind changes in the composition of trade and the complex factors that determine how individual sectors of each economy respond to economic change in all the others. In the first part, the author designs and estimates a multicountry, multisectoral general equilibrium model. The model is operationalized with careful estimates of the parameters that govern demand, production, and trade in both economies. In the second part, the model is employed to explore various aspects of interdependence and commercial policy. Peter Petri's findings indicate, among other things, that the American and Japanese economies are more closely related than one might judge from the size of their trade. As a result of differences in the structures of the two economies, their interdependence is sharply asymmetric, with economic events in the United States having a greater impact on Japan than vice versa. The study also shows that the roots of bilateral conflict can be traced to structural causes, and suggests that recent structural changes may have increased the incentives for protectionism.
In this book, Aaron Forsberg presents an arresting account of Japan's postwar economic resurgence in a world polarized by the Cold War. His fresh interpretation highlights the many connections between Japan's economic revival and changes that occurred in
Though it had helped define the New South era, the first wave of regional industrialization had clearly lost momentum even before the Great Depression. These nine original case studies look at how World War II and its aftermath transformed the economy, culture, and politics of the South. From perspectives grounded in geography, law, history, sociology, and economics, several contributors look at southern industrial sectors old and new: aircraft and defense, cotton textiles, timber and pulp, carpeting, oil refining and petrochemicals, and automobiles. One essay challenges the perception that southern industrial growth was spurred by a disproportionate share of federal investment during and after the war. In covering the variety of technological, managerial, and spatial transitions brought about by the South's "second wave" of industrialization, the case studies also identify a set of themes crucial to understanding regional dynamics: investment and development; workforce training; planning, cost-containment, and environmental concerns; equal employment opportunities; rural-to-urban shifts and the decay of local economies entrepreneurism; and coordination of supply, service, and manufacturing processes. From boardroom to factory floor, the variety of perspectives in The Second Wave will significantly widen our understanding of the dramatic reshaping of the region in the decades after 1940.
Consumer electronics and computers redefined life and work in the twentieth century. In Inventing the Electronic Century, Pulitzer Prize-winning business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., traces their origins and worldwide development. This masterful analysis is essential reading for every manager and student of technology.