This comparison of labor-management relations at Deutsche Telekom (DT) and NTT Group (formerly Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) demonstrates the value of considering both institutions and strategic decision-making to understand the interaction between companies and unions. As corporations...

This paper analyses the structure and functions of suppliers' associations (kyory-okukai) in the automobile industry in Japan. The bilateral assembler-supplier relationship has received much attention recently as a source of Japanese industrial competitiveness. However, this paper argues that...

This comparison of labor-management relations at Deutsche Telekom (DT) and NTT Group (formerly Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) demonstrates the value of considering both institutions and strategic decision-making to understand the interaction between companies and unions. As corporations...

The emergent business model literature, revolving mainly around the mechanisms through which new business models create and deliver value, has left the value capture challenge under-explored. This paper examines how an incumbent firm profits from business model innovation through the study of...

This paper reviews the implications of outsourcing and offshoring for the productivity of business services in the UK. Official statistics indicate that business-service productivity has grown by over 20 per cent in the last 7 years at the same time as employment grew by 20 per cent. The paper...

What factors facilitate and constrain the sustained development and replication of organizational capabilities of suppliers? This question is addressed in a comparison of historical case studies of Toyota, Nissan and Honda in Japan. First, as expected, replication difficulty is overcome by...

Two contrasting conceptualizations of skills lead one to attribute different roles to inter-firm networks. If skills are regarded as a public good, then inter-firm networks are like clubs that police the scope for firms to benefit from skills without paying for their acquisition. By contrast, if...

This paper investigates how employee representation affects, and is affected by, the way corporations structure themselves. In the analytical framework employed in the paper, the structure of the corporation and national labour institutions constitute key constraints on the goals of unions and...