Japan’s post‐war economic success: Deming, quality, and contextual realities

Abstract

It is difficult to unravel the thread of W. Edwards Deming’s impact on the post‐war industrial recovery of Japan and its transformation from a manufacturer of shabby copies of Western goods to a pre‐eminent producer of high‐quality goods. His name is woven, however, into the fabric of Japanese industrial history. Deming helped launch a campaign for institutionalizing “quality control” within the Japanese manufacturing sector, which adopted a number of the terms and concepts he advocated. In fact, his pedagogical approach dovetailed perfectly with, and helped to provide a philosophical basis for, the infusion of quality as an intrinsic part of the production process. Most importantly, Deming was conveying these concepts on the eve of the “electronics revolution”, where unparalleled precision, cleanliness, and consistency of product were essential metrics determining success or failure. However, the true extent of Deming’s influence may never be known as it was caught up in the complex dynamics that characterized Japan’s industrial resurgence from the late 1940s through the 1980s.

Citation

Leitner, P.M. (1999), "Japan’s post‐war economic success: Deming, quality, and contextual realities", Journal of Management History (Archive), Vol. 5 No. 8, pp. 489-505. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552529910290539