Search results

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implementation and evaluation of a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) training course for clinicians in Chiba, the sixth-largest province in Japan.

Individual CBT for obsessive-compulsive disorder, bulimia nervosa, or social anxiety disorder was delivered by trainees of the Chiba CBT training course in a single study design.

The results demonstrated that individual CBT delivered by trainees led to statistically significant reductions in symptom severity for all three disorders. Feedback from the trainees indicated that the training course achieved its aims.

Barriers to the dissemination of CBT in Japan such as opportunities for training and possible solutions are discussed.

This paper evaluates the Chiba CBT training course, which is a Japanese adaptation of the UK Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Project and the first post-qualification CBT training course in Japan.

We investigate fluctuations in the nominal effective exchange rates (NEERs) of East Asian currencies and the Asian monetary unit (AMU), which is computed as a weighted average of East Asian currencies during the global financial crisis. We find that NEERs were more stable for countries that continued to follow a currency basket system during the global financial crisis.

Furthermore, we investigate the relationships among NEERs, AMU, and AMU deviation indicators, which indicate the extent of the deviation in the exchange rate of each East Asian currency from a benchmark rate given in terms of the AMU. By comparing NEERs with a combination of AMU and AMU deviation indicators, we find that there is a strong relationship between them, both before and after the global financial crisis. These results indicate that a coordinated exchange rate policy aimed at stabilizing the AMU deviation indicators will be effective in stabilizing the NEERs of East Asian currencies. In this respect, the AMU deviation indicators, which indicate intraregional exchange rates among East Asian currencies, play a crucial role.

Because NEER trade weights are widely similar among East Asian currencies, a policy aimed at stabilizing a home currency against its NEER may lead to a coordinated exchange rate policy without a common consensus among East Asian countries. In the future, however, coordinated monetary policies should be considered along with coordinated exchange rate policies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze recent Japanese corruption prevention mechanisms and assess the efforts of the Japanese government in winning public trust.

This paper discusses public sector corruption in Japan at an institutional level through a study of its features and current status. It then analyzes and evaluates the effectiveness of corruption prevention measures and the public perceptions of these measures. The paper concludes with a discussion on whether such measures can be adopted by other countries.

Recent preventive measures in Japan are effective in decreasing corruption opportunities, but not in enhancing the public trust of the government. Major findings are: first, Japan is the only Asian country without a dedicated anti-corruption agency (ACA); second, there is more emphasis on corruption prevention in the anti-corruption measures; third, the government is concerned with initiating measures to prevent the further erosion of public trust when corruption occurs; fourth, while preventive measures such as public disclosure and whistle-blower protection acts are in place, public awareness of their existence is still lacking and the usage of these systems is limited; fifth, more efforts are placed on prevention through the promotion of government transparency and accountability and public sector ethics education rather than penalizing the corrupt offenders; and sixth, though efforts to minimize amakudari practices are made, lack of political will and its sustainability prevents further reform.

This paper will be useful for scholars, policy-makers, and anti-corruption practitioners interested in learning how Japanese government practices prevent corruption.

Bertrand Candelon is a professor in International Monetary Economics. He received a PhD from Universite Catholique de Louvain. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, he joined University Maastricht, School of Business and Economics in 2001. He has written extensive works in the area of international finance, in particular on contagion and on the analysis of financial market co-movements. He is one of the founders of the Methods in International Finance Network.

This paper aims to explore the lean production paradigm as promoter of workers' creativity and thinking potential, and recognize this human potential as a fundamental asset for companies' growth and success, being a major factor to face the disturbing and unpredictable needs of current markets, providing companies with the necessary agility. The authors believe these thinkers are the base for an agile company and learning organization.

The objectives were achieved through a deep literature review, starting with the Toyota production system (TPS) origins. Some industrial lean case studies were also explored to show that the adoption of a lean culture promotes a pro‐active attitude and behavior that are so important for companies nowadays.

This paper explores the association between lean production and the promotion of thinkers. For a long period, and even nowadays, it is common to consider the worker as just another production factor that the companies explore to obtain the maximum utilization. This was a result from the distorted knowledge of the Taylor principles and the Ford assembly line model, seeing the worker as a gear in the “big machine”. Lean production was seen, for many years and by many authors, as an extension of this Taylorist/Fordist model but this paper highlights lean production as a work organization model where the worker assumes a position of thinker, continuously looking for improvement and continuously looking for wastes. By reducing wastes, the company will be prepared to accommodate changes and will attain agility.

This paper is mainly based on literature review and on some industrial case studies of lean implementations (recent or just a few years ago); a deep research is necessary on the cause‐effect relation between lean production adoption and promotion of thinkers.

Helping companies to recognize the importance of workers as thinkers will have relevant impacts through the reduction of waste and costs, improving quality and increase productivity and revenue. Also, for workers, this recognition means respect, self‐esteem and confidence, and, essentially, more satisfaction with work.

With lean production and agility, better products will quickly reach society, contributing thus to clients' satisfaction. Also, lean companies' CEO and workers looking for wastes will lead to a reduction of energy consumption, raw materials needs and gas emissions (reducing pollution of air, land and water), producing only what is needed. Being satisfied with their work they will be happier contributing to the raising of the country's happiness.

The authors are not aware of similar research. The paper is meant for those who are interested in improving their companies' operations and workers' relationships.

Lean culture has been noted to be an underdeveloped concept. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of Lean culture by determining its leading cultural clusters.

Content analysis was used to perform top relevant keywords exploration and qualitative analysis on main text of 33 reference books, 21 Lean generic and 12 Lean healthcare, consolidated as three cases (Lean general, Lean Liker et al. and Lean healthcare).

Four emergent Lean’s leading cultural clusters: operations, change, collectivity and humanity were identified inductively from ten 10 relevant keywords, namely, in order of importance: work, time, process, Lean, system, improvement, production, patient, people and team. Saliency of the word “time” is noteworthy. Cross-validation of these cultural clusters is demonstrated through sociotechnical systems theory.

Content analysis is shown to be an effective research method enabling inductive analysis. Identification of four leading clusters should support productive further research on Lean culture.

The four cultural clusters indicate to healthcare and other domains managers, who wish to improve their Lean cultural transformation success rate, to focus their attention to what their organization actually does (operations), to how improvement happens (change) and to how everything (collectivity) and everyone (humanity) work together in their organization.

This work applies innovative content analysis on Lean reference books. It highlights the importance of time as an underappreciated Lean culture element. It provides evidence and additional support for link between Lean and sociotechnical systems theory.

The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic review of four decades of scholarly lean literature and identify phases of lean while highlighting core knowledge and voids from within the scholarly lean literature.

The methodology applied to better understand lean over the past four decades was a systematic review of literature, as described by Machi and McEvoy in The Literature Review: Six Steps to Success.

This literature review has synthesized and categorized four decades of scholarly literature, along with influential books from credible researchers and practitioners of lean, in an effort to decipher the lean thinking paradigm from jargon to a commonly‐shared language. In total, five themes evolved from the analysis starting with the Discovery phase (1970‐1990), Dissemination phase (1991‐1996), Implementation phase (1997‐2000), Enterprise phase (2001‐2005), and the most recent phase of Performance (2006‐2009).

The literature review was limited to articles available to the researcher using search terms restricted to: lean manufacturing, lean production, lean thinking, lean and review, lean and Toyota Production System, lean assessment, lean culture, lean transformation. The databases accessed through EBSCO were: Academic Source Premier, Business Source Premier, ERIC, and PsycINFO.

Publications tracing the lineage of lean over the past four decades are sparse, based on lean scholarly literature, exposing a void in the knowledge base. This literature review should assist other scholars and practitioners who are interested in substantiating their lean endeavours.