Carla I. Koen. Comparative International Management

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‘They then insert the blanks in massive stamping presses containing matched upper and

lower dies. When these dies are pushed together under thousands of pounds of pressure,

the two-dimensional blank takes the three-dimensional shape of a car fender or a truck

door as it moves through a series of presses.

‘The problem with this second method, from Ohno’s perspective, was the minimum

scale required for economical operation. The massive and expensive Western press lines

were designed to operate at about twelve strokes per minute, three shifts a day, to make a

million or more of a given part in a year. Yet, in the early days, Toyota’s entire production

was a few thousand vehicles a year’ (Womack et al., 1990:52).*

‘The dies could be changed so that same press line could make many parts, but doing

so presented major difﬁculties. The dies weighed many tons each, and workers had to

align them in the press with absolute precision. A slight misalignment produced wrinkled

parts. A more serious misalignment could produce a nightmare in which the sheet metal

melted in the die, necessitating extremely expensive and time-consuming repairs’

(Womack et al., 1990: 52).* In order to avoid these problems, die changes were assigned

to specialists. Die changes were undertaken methodically, and typically required a full day

to go from the last part with the old dies to the ﬁrst acceptable part from the new ones.

Western manufacturers, selling a large enough volume, found that they could often ‘ded-

icate’ a set of presses to a speciﬁc part and stamp these parts for months, or even years,

without changing dies.

Toyota’s budget, however, was unable to ﬁnance the hundreds of stamping presses

needed to make all the parts needed for the car and truck bodies. Its capital budget dic-

tated that practically the entire car be stamped from a few press lines. This gave rise to

the idea of developing simple die-change techniques and to change dies frequently –

every two to three hours versus two to three months – using rollers to move dies in and

out of position, and simple adjustment mechanisms. ‘Because the new techniques were

easy to master and production workers were idle during the die changes, Ohno hit

upon the idea of letting production workers perform the die changes as well’ (Womack

et al., 1990: 52).* After endless experiments, from the late 1940s onwards, Ohno

eventually perfected his technique for quick changes. ‘By the late 1950s, he had

reduced the time required to change dies from a day to an astonishing three minutes

and eliminated the need for die-change specialists. In the process he made an unex-

pected discovery – it actually cost less per part to make small batches of stampings than

to run off enormous lots.

‘There were two reasons for this phenomenon. Making small batches eliminated the

carrying cost of the huge inventories of ﬁnished parts that mass-production systems

required. Even more important, making only a few parts before assembling them into a

car caused stamping mistakes to show up almost instantly.

‘The consequences of this latter discovery were enormous. It made those in the

stamping shop much more concerned about quality, and it eliminated the waste of large

numbers of defective parts – which had to be repaired at great expense, or even discarded

– that were discovered only long after manufacture’ (Womack et al., 1990: 53).*

MANAGING RESOURCES: PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT 321

* Extracts on this page are reprinted with the permission of Rawson Associates/Scribner, an imprint of Simon and

Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Machine That Changed The World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones

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However, while Toyota made having small or zero inventories a priority and thus

chose to concentrate on small-batch manufacturing, the objective was still similar to that

of mass production: to produce the highest possible cumulative volume of each product.

Long total runs were (and are) decisive for the careful preparation of the manufacture of

each part; standardizing tools, methods and operations; streamlining suppliers; and

developing the just-in-time (JIT) ﬂow. It cannot be said, then, that the Toyota system is the

antithesis of mass production; it is rather the antithesis of large-batch manufacturing.

Flexibility is a matter of switching quickly between a number of standardized models – of

retooling from model A to model B, for instance. The high frequency of such switching in

the Toyota system has also meant that ‘resetting work’ could itself be standardized and

intensiﬁed. It has become part of the highly rationalized system of mass production. The

Toyota system’s ﬂexibility of mass production has therefore been argued to represent an

extension of the sphere of inﬂuence of scientiﬁc management (Berggren, 1992: 28–9).

In contrast to large-batch mass production, however, in order to make the small-batch

system work – a system that ideally produced two hours or less of inventory – an extremely

skilled and highly motivated workforce was needed. (See Table 7.1 for a contrast between

mass and lean production.) If workers failed to anticipate problems before they occurred,

and didn’t take the initiative to devise solutions, the work of the whole factory could easily

grind to a halt. Holding back knowledge and effort – repeatedly noted by industrial sociol-

ogists as a salient feature of all mass-production systems – would swiftly lead to disaster in

Toyota. As indicated, labour conditions had changed in Japan after the Second World War;

strong unions combined with severe restrictions on the ability of company owners to ﬁre

workers led to protracted negotiations between unions and owners at many plants,

including Toyota. These negotiations resulted in the development of a compromise that, to

a large extent, remains the formula for labour relations in the Japanese auto industry

today. Speciﬁcally, employees were granted lifetime employment and seniority pay, and

often received access to company facilities such as housing, recreation, and so forth (see

Chapter 5 for a full explanation). In return, the company expected that most employees

would remain with the company for their entire working lives. The employees also agreed

to be ﬂexible in work assignments and active in promoting the interests of the company by

initiating improvements rather than merely responding to problems.

This new approach to human capital allowed Toyota to eliminate other types of waste

(muda) that characterized mass production – that is, wasted effort, materials and time. At

Toyota it was thought that assembly workers – instead of performing one or two simple

tasks, repetitively as in mass production – could probably do most of the functions of the

Fordist specialists and do them much better because of their direct acquaintance with

conditions on the line. Toyota started to group workers in teams with a team leader rather

than a foreman. ‘The teams were given a set of assembly steps, their piece of the line,

and told to work together on how best to perform the necessary operations. The

team leader would do assembly tasks as well as coordinate the team, and, in

particular, would ﬁll in for any absent worker – concepts unheard of in mass-

production plants’ (Womack et al., 1990: 56).* The team was also given the job of

322 COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT

* Extracts on this page are reprinted with the permission of Rawson Associates/Scribner, an imprint of Simon and

Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Machine That Changed The World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones

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MANAGING RESOURCES: PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT 323

housekeeping, minor tool repair and quality checking. Finally, once the teams were

running smoothly, time was set aside periodically for them to suggest ways of improving

the process. This continuous, incremental improvement process (kaizen) took place in col-

laboration with the industrial engineers, who were still present but in much smaller

numbers than in the mass-production plants (ibid.).

In striking contrast to the mass-production plant (where stopping the line was the

responsibility of the senior line manager), to eliminate the passing on of errors until the

end of the line, in the Toyota plant a cord was placed above every workstation and workers

were instructed to stop the whole assembly line immediately if a problem emerged that

they couldn’t ﬁx. Then, the whole team would come over to work on the problem. It was

reasoned that the mass-production practice of simply passing on errors in order to keep

the line running caused errors to multiply endlessly. Because problems would not be

Source: adapted from Zhiang Lin and Chun Hui (1999).

Table 7.1 Lean and mass production systems compared

Lean system Mass system

Type of production Small-batch flexible mass

production

Large-batch mass production

Complexity Low

• elimination of waste in

structure

• fewer functional

hierarchical levels

High

• allows complex and

redundant structure

• more hierarchical levels

and more differentiated

divisions

Formalization Low

• emphasis on teamwork

• flexible job responsibilities

• encourages multiple job

skills and expertise

High

• high division of individual

labour

• strict rules for individual

job responsibilities

• discourages multiple job

skills

Centralization Low

• lateral communication is

encouraged and decisions

are made collectively on a

team basis

• encourages participation

from lower-level

employees and lateral-

level co-workers

High

• communication and

decision-making is based

on strict vertical individual

command chain

• discourages participation

from lower-level

employees or lateral-level

co-workers

Problem-solving attitude Proactive

• workers actively search for

problems

• workers are trained to

tackle problems

Reactive

• workers wait passively for

problems to happen

• workers are trained to

pass rather than to tackle

problems

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discovered until the very end of the line, a large number of similarly defective vehicles

would have been built before the problem was discovered.

Moreover, in mass-production plants, problems tended to be treated as random

events. The idea was simply to repair each error and hope that it didn’t recur. Toyota insti-

tuted a system of problem-solving, which taught production workers to systematically

trace every error back to its ultimate cause, then to devise a ﬁx, so that it would never

occur again. After a while the result was that the line practically never stopped, the

amount of rework needed before shipment fell continually and the quality of the shipped

cars improved steadily. This was for the simple reason that quality inspection, no matter

how diligent, simply cannot detect all the defects that can be assembled into today’s

complex vehicles.

A major strength of the lean production system is the lean supply chain. The task of a

ﬁnal assembly plant, which assembles the major components into a complete vehicle,

accounts for only 15 per cent of the total manufacturing process. ‘The bulk of the process

involves engineering and fabricating more than 10,000 discrete parts and assembling

these into perhaps 100 major components – engines, transmissions, steering gears, sus-

pensions, and so forth.

Coordinating this process so that everything comes together at the right time with

high quality and low cost has been a continuing challenge to the ﬁnal assembler ﬁrms in

the auto industry’ (Womack et al., 1990: 58).*

While Ford’s initial answer to this problem was complete or 100 per cent vertical

integration, after the Second World War, the company disintegrated to 50 per cent. The

world’s mass-production assemblers ended up adopting widely varying degrees of formal

integration, ranging from about 25 per cent in-house production at smaller specialist

ﬁrms (i.e. Porsche and Saab) to 70 per cent at General Motors. The central engineering

staffs of mass-production assemblers such as Ford and GM designed most of the parts

needed in a vehicle and the component systems they comprised. A number of suppliers –

whether formally part of the assembler ﬁrm or independent businesses – were given the

drawings and were asked for bids on a given number of parts. Among all the outside ﬁrms

and internal divisions that were asked to bid, the lowest bidder got the business. In

general, success depended on price, quality and delivery reliability, and the car makers

often switched business between ﬁrms at relatively short notice.

At Toyota, it was found that the real question was not the make-or-buy decisions

that occasioned so much debate in mass-production firms, but rather how the assem-

bler and the suppliers could work together smoothly to reduce costs and improve

quality, whatever formal, legal relationship they might have. The solution to this

problem was found in taking a new, lean production approach to components supply.

The first step was to organize suppliers into functional tiers. First-tier suppliers were

responsible for working as an integral part of the product-development team in devel-

oping a new product – for instance, a steering, braking or electrical system that would

work in harmony with the other systems. Toyota stimulated cooperation among its

first-tier suppliers in order to improve the design process. ‘Because each supplier, for the

324 COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT

* Extracts on this page are reprinted with the permission of Rawson Associates/Scribner, an imprint of Simon and

Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Machine That Changed The World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones

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MANAGING RESOURCES: PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT 325

most part, specialized in one type of component and did not compete in that respect

with other suppliers in the group, sharing information was comfortable and mutually

beneficial. Then, each first-tier supplier formed a second tier of suppliers under itself.

Companies in the second tier were assigned the job of fabricating individual parts.

These suppliers were manufacturing specialists, usually without much expertise in

product engineering but with strong backgrounds in process engineering and plant

operations’ (Womack et al., 1990: 60–1).* Second-tier suppliers were also grouped into

supplier associations to exchange information on advances in manufacturing tech-

niques.

Such a high degree of cooperation and information sharing cannot be obtained

through marketplace relationships, and Toyota did not wish to vertically integrate its sup-

pliers into a single, large bureaucracy. ‘Instead, Toyota spun its in-house supply operations

off into quasi-independent ﬁrst-tier supplier companies in which Toyota retained a frac-

tion of the equity and developed similar relationships with other suppliers who had been

completely independent. As the process proceeded, Toyota’s ﬁrst-tier suppliers acquired

Case: Japanese Production Practices in China

hina has become an increasingly important destination for Japanese

foreign direct investment. China is second only to the USA as a location for

Japanese overseas investment. Moreover, Japan is the second largest

inward investor to China, behind the quasi-overseas Hong Kong and Taiwan. The

question to be answered in this context is to what extent Japanese production

management techniques have been transferred to Japanese plants in China. The

societal arguments of similarities in the social relationships of work tend to indi-

cate that the ‘process of Japanization’ should be much easier in Asia than in

western countries.

In order to evaluate this question, 20 Japanese manufacturing plants based

in China were investigated. Of the 20 plants, 12 were located in Guangdong

Province and four each in Nantong and Tianjin. Categorized by industry, there

were eight chemical-related plants, seven consumer-electrical, four apparel and

one machining (auto parts) factory. Japanese investors held majority share own-

ership in over half the plants. The average age of the plants was a little over five

years, with the oldest 14 years old and the youngest only 1 year old. The primary

objective for 13 of the Japanese firms setting up manufacturing operations in

China was to take advantage of cheap land, labour and raw material costs. This

was especially evident in Guangdong Province. In five cases, proximity to Hong

Kong was a major objective and, in four, it was access to China’s growing market.

* Extracts on this page are reprinted with the permission of Rawson Associates/Scribner, an imprint of Simon and

Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Machine That Changed The World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones

This case is based on Taylor (1999).

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326 COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT

In half of the cases, the Chinese partner was a government agency and/or a

state-ownedenterprise. For the Chinese partnersthetransfer of hardtechnologyand

modern ‘capitalist’ management systems was of primary importance. In three cases,

the Chinese managers also considered employment opportunities and stimulation of

international competitiveness as being important in cooperating with the Japanese.

The plants had generally only a few (three to six) Japanese personnel

members on site. There were two exceptions to this: one where a plant had 150

Japanese and over 3000 local staff making precision electronic goods and CD

drives, and another employing over 8000 locals and about 70–80 Hong Kong and

Japanese staff, which made earphones, speakers and similar audio products.

Both these product lines required a reasonably high degree of technical support

in order to ensure such processes as quality management and machine mainten-

ance. At least one more firm also required such high-level quality assurance, but

this was achieved by other means.

With respect to production technology, it was found that, in half the cases,

most of the machinery was imported from Japan. In general, the plants in China

had more or less the same physical sort of factories as would be found in Japan,

though sometimes on a smaller scale.

With respect to production and inventory management, however, there were

significant differences between plants in China and those in Japan. In Japan, pro-

duction varies according to consumer demand. At its most sophisticated, JIT

production allows output to correspond to final demand through a system of pulling

production through the factory, significantly reducing the need for inventories. In

addition, the ultimate in lean arrangements allows multiskilled workers to work on

a range of products in short runs so as to rapidly match market demands, leading

to mixed production, which has been regarded as a key feature of JIT.

In eight Chinese plants, there was no variation at all in production output over

a year. These firms included five chemical and three electronics plants, the latter

being two component suppliers to Japan and one electronics multinational pro-

ducing facsimile machines for export. Among these plants, only two held very low

levels of stock of finished goods on-site. This reflects highly predictable produc-

tion output rather than the achievement of JIT production.

The other 12 firms coped with fluctuations in product demand primarily

through traditional techniques of either producing for stock or varying working

time. Five plants, mainly labour-intensive apparel, leather products and elec-

tronics manufacturers coped with variations in product demand using overtime

work. The other seven firms, including leather goods producers, three chemical

firms and two electronics plants (making laser pitches and stereos), employed

temporary workers at peak times. Other plants tried to maintain steady produc-

tion, sometimes despite seasonal variations in demand. Thus, stocks were

accumulated either to maximize machine utilization or in order to preserve regu-

larity in plant operations, large variations in activity being seen as disruptive to

work routines.

Another aspect of Japanese production techniques – that is, frequent and fast

changes in production runs, requiring workers to have knowledge of various types

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MANAGING RESOURCES: PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT 327

of product – was also applied only marginally. While all 20 firms had some kind of

variation in their product lines over time, this was usually limited to workers

having no more than one product change a day or three a week. Moreover, these

changes in products usually had minimal impact on line workers’ jobs. In

chemical production, change-overs took much longer than in, say, electronics,

resulting in production-line stoppages of hours at a time. Consequently, the

notions of flexible and mixed production were not really applied, the costs of

‘retooling’ far outweighing any benefits from lower stockholding.

Chinese employees pointed to Japanese workers’ excessive attention to detail.

Such detail included ascertaining and reducing rejection rates from individuals

and machines, regulating ‘wasted time’ from toilet breaks and machine set-ups,

as well as frequent management meetings to review and plan. Japanese manage-

ment, on the other hand, was frustrated by the lack of urgency or seriousness that

the Chinese workers applied to this ‘attention to detail’; a reflection of the apparent

Chinese lack of interest in Japanese efforts towards continuous improvement.

Japanese firms are also well known for the quality of their products, brought

about in large part by the efforts of shop-floor workers, whether this involvement

is voluntary or coerced, or a combination of the two. What is seen as distinctive

about Japanese quality management is the organization of shop-floor employees

so that they are involved in continuous quality control and quality improvement. In

China, all 20 firms were submitted to the strict quality management measures

being introduced by the Japanese. However, quality control was in the hands of

Japanese experts, and involved multiple checking, goods inward and outward

checks, and checks at various stages of production. Moreover, the Japanese

concern with quality was backed with incentive pay schemes that took account of

rejects attributed to individual workers. Thus, strong pressure from material

incentives was placed on workers to conform to quality standards, with hardly any

inculcation of quality consciousness among Chinese workers. In two firms, the

work group rather than the individual was held accountable for quality targets, so

that the group’s bonus was dependent on each individual’s performance. Thus, on

the whole, there was little evidence that sufficient concern was given to incorpo-

rating workers’ intrinsic motivation towards developing a consciousness of quality.

Questions

1. What does the case tell you about the transferability of Japanese production

techniques to China?

2. Explain how, if at all, the Japanese firms adapted their techniques to the

Chinese environment?

3. Assess whether the production techniques explained in the case could be

transferred to the US and German production environment.

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much of the rest of the equity in each other’ (Womack et al., 1990: 61).* Toyota also

encouraged its suppliers to perform work for other assemblers, and for ﬁrms in other

industries, because outside business almost always generated higher proﬁt margins.

Toyota also shared personnel with its supplier-group ﬁrms in two ways. ‘It would lend

them personnel to deal with workload surges, and it would transfer senior managers not

in line for top positions at Toyota to senior positions in supplier ﬁrms’ (Womack et al.,

1990: 61).*

Finally, to coordinate the ﬂow of parts within the supply system on a day-to-day basis,

the famous just-in-time (JIT) system, known as kanban at Toyota, was developed. The idea

behind it was to simply convert a vast group of suppliers and parts plants into one large

‘machine’, like Ford’s plant, by dictating that parts would only be produced at each step to

supply the immediate demand of the next step; the mechanism was the containers

carrying parts to the next step. As each container was used up, it was sent back to the pre-

vious step, and this became the automatic signal to make more parts. This simple idea was

enormously difﬁcult to implement as it eliminated practically all inventories and meant

that when one small part of the vast production system failed, the whole system came to

a standstill (Womack et al., 1990: 62).

While lean production represents a major advance in productivity, working con-

ditions and the character of work didn’t seem to have changed much from the classical

Fordist system. If anything, the rhythm and pace of the work on the assembly line is more

inexorable under the Japanese management system than it ever was before. Off-line jobs,

such as those in subassembly (the senior workers’ favourite positions, in which a personal

work pace was possible) have been outsourced or are geared strictly to the main line by

means of JIT control. Idle time is squeezed out of each workstation through the appli-

cation of kaizen techniques, while work pressure has been intensiﬁed and stafﬁng

drastically reduced in the name of eliminating all ‘waste’ (muda) (Berggren, 1992: 5–6).

The combined JIT and quality pressure (zero defects) of the modern ‘Japanized’ lines

demand a high degree of mental concentration on work that is still very standardized.

Acquiescent unions and highly dependent workers who submit to the relentless demands

explain that, until the late 1980s, Japanese auto makers had never had to confront and

change the character of the work itself (Berggren, 1992: 6).

From the early 1990s onwards, as the Japanese labour market pool has reduced in

size, criticisms of the industrial conditions, the long working hours and the trying

physical environment have become widespread. Manufacturing ﬁrms have been encoun-

tering mounting recruitment difﬁculties, and there has been a soaring turnover among

new hirees. It seemed, then, that the prescription of some (i.e. Womack et al., 1990) that

the West must adopt the Japanese production system was out of sync with the debate in

Japan in the 1990s. In fact, many of the demands raised in the Japanese debate were strik-

ingly similar to the goals of the Swedish work reforms, which were applied from the

mid-1980s onwards (see below) and, more generally, to the European human-centred

concept of work. Indeed, while the emphasis used to be one-sidedly, on productive

efﬁciency at the cost of workers’ needs for fulﬁlment, the Swedish concept widened the

328 COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT

* Extracts on this page are reprinted with the permission of Rawson Associates/Scribner, an imprint of Simon and

Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Machine That Changed The World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones

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perspective and stressed the humanitarian concern that work should also provide worker

satisfaction. It was recognized that the effectiveness of work is greatly inﬂuenced by the

degree of satisfaction workers derive from it.

Swedish Uddevallaism

From the late 1960s, some countries and some companies began to develop programmes

to humanize work. The clear goal of this project was to seek ways of organizing produc-

tion so that it would be more suited to the requirements of a younger generation with little

desire to enter the manufacturing industry. Hence, initial efforts at robotization were

designed to eliminate the most tedious and dangerous tasks. Modiﬁcations were made to

the principles of the assembly line – for instance, through experiments with semi-

autonomous groups. Without doubt, it was in Sweden that this work was developed most

resolutely and systematically (Boyer and Durand, 1997).

From the 1970s onwards, rather like what happened in most advanced industrial

countries (including Sweden), the movement against Taylorist work practices fostered

widespread interest in organizational reform and socio-technical engineering. In Sweden

this interest became permanent and gathered new momentum in the second half of the

1980s, with the development of a distinctive assembly design and work organization in

the Swedish auto industry. Swedish car manufacturer Volvo was searching for an

approach that differed from the international mainstream in that it intended to create a

‘human’ workplace. By the late 1980s, new solutions had materialized in a number of

new facilities, with Volvo’s Uddevalla plant being the prototype of the Swedish ‘experi-

ment in humanistic manufacturing’ (Berggren, 1992: vii).

The Uddevalla project began in 1985, the year in which Volvo was the world’s most

proﬁtable car manufacturer. ‘Sweden was in a period of intensive economic expansion,

during which labour shortages were acute. At the same time, an extensive debate was

taking place about repetitive strain injuries (RSIs) in industrial jobs. More broadly, there

was renewed general interest in the reform of working life’ (Berggren, 1992: 12). While

different sections of the auto industry launched projects for change, Uddevalla had the

most comprehensive and consistent ambitions. At Volvo’s Uddevalla plant, small,

autonomous teams build complete cars (in ergonomically correct positions) in work cycles

lasting several hours (a traditional assembly line has short work cycles, often lasting only

minutes). The plant attracted wide public interest as an example of the most fundamental

attempt so far to solve the problems of the auto industry: the inexorable rhythm of the line

(with no opportunity to vary the pace), the overwhelming monotony and repetitiveness of

the work, the heavy physical strain, the lack of free movement, and the difﬁculty of

gaining a sense of purpose and meaning in the fragmented work process (ibid.)

The novelty of ‘Uddevallaism’ was that it combined small-scale assembly with a

largely automated materials-handling process, a computer-integrated information

system, a comprehensive development of new assembly tools, and signiﬁcant new forms

of vocational training (Berggren, 1992: 13). The plant’s practices embodied a radical shift

away from line assembly. Volvo decided to mass-produce cars at Uddevalla without using

assembly lines. In fact, at Uddevalla, the anthropocentric strategy within the Volvo Group

MANAGING RESOURCES: PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT 329

Unless indicated otherwise, the explanation of Uddevallaism in this section draws on Berggren (1992).

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culminated in what was called a ‘transcendent’ production system: assembly work was

transcending the conﬁnements of Taylorized fragmentation, thereby attaining a new

intellectual quality. ‘Workers could arrive at an intimate understanding of the production

process and its individual functions, as well as a sense of meaningful participation in a

large productive organization’ (ibid.). Moreover, there was an appreciable reduction in

physical strain thanks to the production design and efforts in the area of ergonomics. The

assemblers were able to control the pace of their work; they were freed from detailed

administrative or technical control. The plant was not only a bold step in creating a

humane workplace, however, but was also a success in a wide range of performance

measures. Rapidly improving productivity (the Uddevalla plant reached the productivity

levels of Volvo’s ‘mass production’ plant in Gothenburg in 1991, two years into oper-

ation) and quality was combined with superior ﬂexibility (in the sense that minimal effort

was needed to build new models), low-cost tooling, unparalleled customer orientation,

and a unique responsiveness to market demands (short lead times – the time span

between customer order and delivery; dealers could offer customers individually speciﬁed

and equipped cars within four weeks).

In general, the Swedish model differs in four important respects from the Japanese

one. First, the organizational changes are strongly linked to changes in the production

arrangement, which aims to create conditions whereby functional groups have some

technical autonomy (Berggren, 1992: 7). Instead of using the assembly line, assembly

was completely stationary and teams were responsible for an entire car. Hence, subdivided

and monotonous mass-production work was integrated to produce more digniﬁed and

holistic tasks. The Swedish assembly trajectory demonstrated that alternatives to repeti-

tive and conﬁned work structures are technically feasible, compatible with varied market

demands and socially highly desirable in that they result in qualitative improvements in

the working conditions, reducing physical workloads as well as mental stress. The design

of the building at Uddevalla was an important part of this new concept. Space was

created for six separate assembly shops, which underlined the commitment to small-scale

ﬁnal assembly. Moreover, the integrated assembly line, signifying a low horizontal division

of labour, had its counterpart in a decentralized organization: plant manager, shop

manager and work teams (low vertical division of labour). The Japanese work teams, by

contrast, were organized directly on the line. In fact, the new organization ﬂattened the

hierarchy and brought management and labour close together, although it did not elimi-

nate the white-collar/blue-collar distinction.

Second, Swedish teamwork differed from the Japanese approach in that it involved

considerable autonomous decision-making and, thus, a substantial reduction in the ver-

tical division of labour (Table 7.2 provides an overview of the differences between the

Swedish and the Japanese forms of teamwork). The teams often selected their own leaders

330 COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT

Box 7.2: Uddevallaism

Uddevallaism combines the most radical reorganization of the division of labour (elim-

ination of the assembly line, ﬁxed station assembly and greatly extended cycle times)

with a capital–labour compromise situated at the national level (centralized nego-

tiations over wages, training and work time).

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