Notes from Toyota-land

Notes from Toyota-land
Author: Darius Mehri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501728792

In 1996, Darius Mehri traveled to Japan to work as a computer simulation engineer within the Toyota production system. Once there, he found a corporate experience far different from what he had expected. Notes from Toyota-land, based on a diary that Mehri kept during his three years at an upper-level Toyota group company, provides a unique insider's perspective on daily work life in Japan and charts his transformation from a wide-eyed engineer eager to be part of the "Japanese Miracle" to a social critic, troubled by Japanese corporate practices. Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings. As both an engaging memoir of cross-cultural misunderstanding and a primer on Japanese business and industrial practices, Notes from Toyota-land will be a revelation to everyone who believes that Japanese business practices are an ideal against which to measure success.

Notes from Toyota-land

Notes from Toyota-land
Author: Darius Mehri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780801442896

"Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings.

Worker Leadership

Worker Leadership
Author: Fred Stahl
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2013-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262317281

How to increase both job satisfaction and enterprise productivity—and make American manufacturing competitive again. How can American manufacturing recapture its former dominance in the globalized industrial economy? In Worker Leadership, Fred Stahl proposes a strategy to boost enterprise productivity and restore America's industrial power. Stahl outlines a revolutionary transformation of industrial culture that offers workers real control of production operations and manufacturing processes (as well as a monetary share of the savings from productivity gains). Stahl develops this new Theory of Worker Productivity into a strategy of Worker Leadership, with concrete, real-world examples. Combining some of the methods of lean manufacturing made famous by Toyota with genuine worker empowerment unlike anything at Toyota, Worker Leadership creates highly productive jobs loaded with responsibility and authority. Workers, Stahl writes, love these jobs precisely because of the opportunities to be creative and productive. Worker Leadership also offers important benefits for organized labor. It promotes the vitality and growth of labor unions through a shared responsibility with management for growth and profitability. Stahl's approach was inspired by changes implemented at John Deere factories by a general manager named Dick Kleine. Stahl uses the story of Kleine's transformation of the Deere factories to construct a checklist of essential conditions for Worker Leadership. He also discusses competition with China and South Korea and tells the story of production that GE recently “reshored” from China to the United States. Stahl considers the potential for applying Worker Leadership beyond manufacturing, provides a brief history of manufacturing, and even reveals the dark side of Toyota's system that opens another competitive opportunity for America. Worker Leadership offers a blueprint for global competitive advantage that should be read by anyone concerned about America's current productivity paralysis.

The Cambridge International Handbook of Lean Production

The Cambridge International Handbook of Lean Production
Author: Thomas Janoski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 890
Release: 2021-03-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108341403

This handbook focuses on two sides of the lean production debate that rarely interact. On the one hand, management and industrial engineering scholars have presented a positive view of lean production as the epitome of efficiency and quality. On the other hand, sociology, industrial relations, and labor relations scholars focus on work speedups, management by stress, trade union positions, and self-exploitation in lean teams. The editors of this volume understand the merits of both views and present them accordingly, bridging the gaps among five disciplines and presenting the best of each perspective. Chapters by internationally acclaimed authors examine the positive, negative and neutral possible effects of lean, providing a global view of lean production while adjusting lean to the cultural and political contexts of different nation-states. As the first multi-lens view of lean production from academic and consultant perspectives, this volume charts a way forward in the world of work and management in our global economy.

The Andalucian Friend

The Andalucian Friend
Author: Alexander Soderberg
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2013-03-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307362493

Enemies are everywhere in this monumental international crime thriller that Brad Thor calls "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets The Sopranos." Hector Guzman has fooled many women. With his quiet charm, easy smile, and smooth demeanor it's easy to fall into his trap, and Sophie Brinkmann, a widowed single mother, is no exception. She quickly learns, though, that his sleek façade masks something sinister. Guzman is the head of a powerful international crime ring with a reach into drugs and weaponry that extends from Europe to South America. His interests are under siege by a ruthless German syndicate who will stop at nothing to stake its claim. But the Guzmans are a family of fighters and will wage war to protect what’s rightfully theirs. When Sophie is unwittingly caught in the crossfire, she must summon everything within her to navigate the intricate web of moral ambiguity, deadly obsession, and craven gamesmanship.

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism
Author: Michael Perelman
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1583672621

Mainstream, or more formally, neoclassical, economics claims to be a science. But as Michael Perelman makes clear in his latest book, nothing could be further from the truth. While a science must be rooted in material reality, mainstream economics ignores or distorts the most fundamental aspect of this reality: that the vast majority of people must, out of necessity, labor on behalf of others, transformed into nothing but a means to the end of maximum profits for their employers. The nature of the work we do and the conditions under which we do it profoundly shape our lives. And yet, both of these factors are peripheral to mainstream economics. By sweeping labor under the rug, mainstream economists hide the nature of capitalism, making it appear to be a system based upon equal exchange rather than exploitation inside every workplace. Perelman describes this illusion as the "invisible handcuffs" of capitalism and traces its roots back to Adam Smith and his contemporaries and their disdain for working people. He argues that far from being a basically fair system of exchanges regulated by the "invisible hand" of the market, capitalism handcuffs working men and women (and children too) through the very labor process itself. Neoclassical economics attempts to rationalize these handcuffs and tells workers that they are responsible for their own conditions. What we need to do instead, Perelman suggests, is eliminate the handcuffs through collective actions and build a society that we direct ourselves.

30-Second Engineering

30-Second Engineering
Author: James Trevelyan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2019-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1782408371

30-Second Engineering surveys the tasks and challenges that engineers face in every field, from civil to electrical, and explores their methods, inventions, and achievements. This introduction to engineering is split into 7 chapters that cover: Engineering Methods--from problem solving to applying mathematics Civil & Environmental Engineering--building bridges, taming rivers and industry ethics Mechanical, Materials & Mechatronic Engineering--from thrust bearings to robotics Chemical Engineering & Energy Production--energy supplies and industry hazards Electrical & Electronic Engineering--from computers to internet storage and biomedical body parts Aerospace & Transport Engineering--driverless cars, floating factories and lessons from space Engineering the future--how engineers endeavour to save the planet Plus profiles of notable engineers, such as Ernst Dickmanns, William Rankine, Liang Jianying and Fazlur Khan. Each topic is summarised in 300 words with one image, helping you understand the subject at great speed. Written by industry experts from around the world, this book gives incredible insight to an underrated but integral occupation. Without it, skyscrapers, driverless cars, energy supply systems, AI, factories, the internet, and aircraft would not exist. Engineering enabled our evolution and this book will arm you with the conversational prowess to discuss it.

Iran Auto

Iran Auto
Author: Darius Mehri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2017-10-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1316772993

Since the revolution of 1979, scholars have portrayed the Islamic State's industrial development capacity in a negative light. Global isolation, incoherent economic planning, and predatory Islamic institutions are often cited as the reasons for lackluster development. In Iran Auto: Building a Global Industry in an Islamic State, Darius Mehri shows how this characterization is misguided. Today, Iran has one of the world's largest automobile industries with national technical capacity. Previous studies ignore the consequences of three decades of Iran's capacity for successful industrialization and changes in global technology transfer that allow countries, even ones isolated from formal global institutions, to build an automobile industry. Mehri shows how industrial nationalists in Iran constructed a network of politically effective relationships to open up space for successful local industrial development, and then tapped into a set of important global linkages to create an industry with high local manufacturing content. This book will open up a new line of inquiry into how countries in the global south can develop a successful national automobile industry without the need to conform to global economic institutions.

Condensed Capitalism

Condensed Capitalism
Author: Daniel Sidorick
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2017-02-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1501707426

Corporations often move factories to areas where production costs, notably labor, taxes, and regulations, are sharply lower than in the original company hometowns. Not every company, however, followed this trend. One of America's most iconic firms, the Campbell Soup Company, was one such exception: it found ways to achieve low-cost production while staying in its original location, Camden, New Jersey, until 1990. The first in-depth history of the Campbell Soup Company and its workers, Condensed Capitalism is also a broader exploration of strategies that companies have used to keep costs down besides relocating to cheap labor havens: lean production, flexible labor sourcing, and uncompromising antiunionism. Daniel Sidorick's study of a classic firm that used these methods for over a century has, therefore, special relevance in current debates about capital mobility and the shifting powers of capital and labor. Sidorick focuses on the engine of the Campbell empire: the soup plants in Camden where millions of cans of food products rolled off the production line daily. It was here that management undertook massive efforts to drive down costs so that the marketing and distribution functions of the company could rely on a limitless supply of products to sell at rock-bottom prices. It was also here that thousands of soup makers struggled to gain some control over their working lives and livelihoods, countering company power with their own strong union local. Campbell's low-cost strategies and the remarkable responses these elicited from its workers tell a story vital to understanding today's global economy. Condensed Capitalism reveals these strategies and their consequences through a narrative that shows the mark of great economic and social forces on the very human stories of the people who spent their lives filling those familiar red-and-white cans.

International and Comparative Business

International and Comparative Business
Author: Leo McCann
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2013-11-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1446296407

′Erudite and accessible, McCann demonstrates how the national gets reconfigured around the global without losing some of its unique features. Far from being a one-size-fits-all Anglo-American template, neoliberalism comes in many different hues and variations. This is by far the best textbook in the field and is destined to become a classic for years to come.′ Manfred B. Steger, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai′i-Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai’i, USA ′A sweeping examination of systems of capitalism in theory and in the world’s major industrial economies leads Leo McCann to challenge the conventional wisdom on globalization. Historical analysis of the evolution of business systems and detailed examination of present practice demonstrate persuasively that, despite facing common challenges, distinctive national differences remain salient. A must read for anyone who needs to understand how business systems operate in an increasingly interdependent world economy.′ - Dr Eileen Appelbaum, Senior Economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, USA Globalization has profound effects on national economies even as distinct national ‘models’ of capitalism remain. International and Comparative Business accessibly tracks the historical and socio-political contexts of the world’s major countries on a chapter-by-chapter basis to the present day. The book provides a comprehensive, critical, yet concise introduction to each of the economies’ key features, including macro overviews as well as organizational and workplace-level analysis. Each chapter features learning objectives, in-depth interpretation and critique of key literature, and annotated further reading to allow readers to rigorously navigate their way through the wealth of material available for each country. This text is essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of international business and cross-cultural management, comparative political economy, and history. Leo McCann is Senior Lecturer in International and Comparative Management at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK