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This research outlines the technological structure of the entire Japanese manufacturing and service industry using the patent information from research and development (R&D) activities to set R&D goals.

By analyzing the technological development capability of individual companies, the direction of the companies' R&D activities and current state of technological fusion between them can be understood. A group of companies participating in a particular product/service market must have the same technological development capabilities. As a result, the ratio of patent applications by a company to the total number of applications in a technical field will be similar across companies. This study uses the inter-company correlation coefficient of the ratio of patent applications by technical field as an index of technological development capability. A total of 167 major companies covering the major industries of Japan were analyzed. The analysis period was 15 years from 2004 to 2018, and the technical fields were rearranged to 42 fields with reference to the International Patent Classification (IPC)-Technology Concordance used by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Considering the fluctuation in patent application opportunities, the number of patent applications was collected for at least three years for the analysis of patent applications by technical field, company and industry.

Examining the entire Japanese industry, the research found that chemicals, ceramics, non-ferrous metals and electrical/electronic equipment act as intermediaries between the respective groups and are linked to the transportation equipment, electrical/electronic equipment and information and communication services industries that are currently driving the Japanese economy. However, the technical connections between these groups are relatively loose. Over the last 15 years, the propagation structure of technical knowledge information has not changed. The progress of technological fusion remains within the scope of commerce and is conditioned by commerce.

Studies focusing on the technological development capability between companies and the technological structure of the Japanese manufacturing and service industries are almost non-existent since 2000 when Japan's economic growth slowed. The analytical methods presented in this research can be applied to individual companies to gain an understanding of technical positions of companies and can be useful for planning a technical environment, business or R&D strategy.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

This study examined how economic freedom and its related components, such as open markets, regulatory efficiency, rule of law and the size of government, affect bank risk behavior, focusing on the Japanese context.

The study employs a two-step GMM framework on the annual data of Japanese banks ranging from 2005 to 2020 to empirically test the hypotheses. Furthermore, we also use the ordinary least square method to ensure the robustness of our mainline findings.

The finding suggests that economic freedom increases the banks' risk-taking, thus making them fragile. The results also highlight that out of the four main subcomponents of economic freedom, regulatory efficiency and government size increase bank risk-taking, while the rule of law and open markets decrease banks' risk-taking. Additionally, we examine how the banks' specific characteristics affect the results by creating a subsample based on capitalization and liquidity ratios. Overall, the results are consistent with the baseline findings. Moreover, the results are robust to alternative proxy measures of risk.

The study's findings have several implications for regulators and policymakers. The results suggest that regulators and policymakers should reconsider their strategies for economic freedom to ensure that they promote stability in the banking system and reduce banks' risk-taking inclinations.

Although previous studies have examined the impact of economic freedom on bank stability and risk-taking, this study is the first to do so in the Japanese context, contributing to the literature by providing new insights and empirical evidence.

The paper aims to provide an understanding of how the transfer of progressive human resource management (HRM) practices may or may fail to render multinational enterprises (MNEs) institutional entrepreneurs creating change in job quality and decent work to underprivileged workers in the low-pay retail sector in Japan.

The paper draws on survey questionnaire data and interviews with workers and management in a foreign retailer in Japan.

The findings suggest that even where MNEs may provide some measurable material improvements in job quality, in this case equal pay for equal work, the total outcomes are nevertheless shaped by institutional context and constraints. In this case, the improvement in pay was intertwined with flexibility demands that were possible to meet for some workers but not others. In particular, women with care responsibilities and competing demands on their time were not able to experience “decent work” in the same way as others.

The study had a relatively low response rate, due to lack of discretion over time experienced by workers in Japan, as well as limited data on program outcomes, with interviews conducted with a small number of participants.

The study suggests that spaces and opportunities exist for MNEs to diverge from dominant practices in given host country locations and exercise a level of agency as emissaries of decent work but successful outcomes require a very thorough understanding of individual worker experiences within the institutional constraints of given environments.

The study offers insights into the complexities of initiatives by MNEs to contribute to the provision of decent work, particularly for workers in underprivileged positions including women in low-pay sectors such as retail, as firm-level practices lead to variable outcomes when filtered through local institutions.

The study brings together a focus on firm-level practices that inform much of the international HRM and international management scholarship with an emphasis on the experiences of workers, which is pursued in the sociology of work, to investigate whether MNEs can be actors in the realising of the Sustainable Development Goals around decent work.

The circular economy (CE) has been endorsed as representing a model that is able to achieve environmental protection through decreased use of raw materials, together with changing economic values and social inclusion thanks to its demand for a wide variety of skill profiles. This has motivated many policy initiatives to support the implementation of the CE. The purpose of this study is to follow such policy initiatives in three geographically anchored industry-specific networks.

The study contributes to the research debate on the CE through a spatial approach with a focus on how the implementation of the CE is conditioned by spatial and regional contexts. The authors investigate three different networks in Sweden for CE with different locations and industrial profiles.

The findings reveal the difficulty that exist in relation to the implementation of the CE. The network and support functions in combination with private industry are vital. The risk of sustaining an uneven regional economic development is evident.

Although research on the development of the CE has proliferated, geographical approaches to this development are comparably rare to date. The authors seek to contextualise the strategy development and policy implementation of a CE policy.

This study investigates the relationship between foreign ownership, earnings quality and overinvestment in Japanese zombie firms.

The study makes use of data from Japanese firms listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2019. The study employs logistic and multinomial logistic models to test whether the overinvestment behavior of zombie firms is mitigated by foreign shareholdings and earnings quality.

The results show that (1) zombie firms tend to overinvest; (2) an increase in foreign ownership mitigates the overinvestment of zombie firms and (3) the mitigation of zombie firms' overinvestment by foreign ownership is stronger with higher earnings quality.

This study extends the discussion of earnings quality and investment efficiency to the zombie firm setting. Previous studies in accounting suggest that high earnings quality enhances firms' investment efficiency. The findings suggest that both a change in ownership structure and high-quality accounting information are necessary to mitigate the inefficiency of zombie firms.

Despite the large number of Indonesian health-care workers working as migrant care workers in Japan, there is a lack of studies that have investigated this phenomenon or assessed the working conditions of Indonesian care workers working in Japanese aged-care facilities. This study aims to explore the work experiences of Indonesian care workers in Japan.

A qualitative descriptive research design was used, and a purposive sample of 18 Indonesian health-care workers (12 nurses and six midwives) who work as care workers in Japan participated in this study. Semistructured interviews were conducted with these participants between December 2022 and January 2023. The data were analyzed using content analysis. The Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research checklist was used to report this study.

Four key themes emerged from the data: easy but mentally challenging, being a care worker is a blessing, working in a partially Muslim-friendly environment and enjoy living: prefer to stay longer.

The work experiences of Indonesian care workers in Japan are complex and multifaceted. By understanding their experiences and needs, the authors can work toward creating more inclusive and supportive workplaces for all.

This study aims to build on the well-documented case of the Olympus scandal to dissect how social networks and corporate culture enabled corporate elites to commit fraud across multiple generations of leaders.

A flexible pattern matching approach was used to identify matches and mismatches between behavioural theory in corporate governance and the patterns observed in data from diverse sources.

The study applies the behavioural theory of corporate governance from different perspectives. Social networks and relationships were essential for the execution of the fraud and keeping it secret. The group of corporate elites actively created opportunities for committing misappropriation. This research presents individuals committing embezzlement because the opportunity already exists, and they can enrich themselves. The group of insiders who committed the fraud elaborated the rationalizations to others and asked outside associates to help rationalise the activities, while usually individuals provide rationalizations to themselves only.

The social processes among actors described in this case can inform the design of mechanisms to detect these behaviours in similar contexts.

This study provides both perspectives on the fraud scandal: the one of the whistle-blowers, and the opposing side of the transgressors and their associates. The extant case studies on Olympus presented the timeframe of the scandal right after the exposure. The current study dissects the events during the fraud execution and presents the case in a neutral or a negative light.

This study aims to investigate whether the increasing robot adoption will affect employment rate and wages to contribute to the economic cycle and sustainable development in the world.

The authors introduce a two-way fixed effect model and ordinary least-squares (OLS) model to evaluate the influence based on relevant data of the eighteen countries with the largest robot stocks and robot densities in the world from 2006 to 2019 to test the influences and do the robustness test and endogeneity test by using empirical models.

The authors’ research findings suggest that increasing robot adoption can cause strong negative impacts on employment for both males and females in these economies. Second, the effect of robots on reducing job opportunities has penetrated different industries. It means that this negative impact of robots is comprehensive for the industry. Third, robot adoption can have a strong positive influence on wages and increase workers' incomes.

The limitations of the study are that the influence of industrial intelligence technologies on the circular economy is diversities in different countries. Thus, this study should consider the development levels of different economies to do additional confirmatory studies.

This study makes out the correlations between industrial robots and the employment market from the circular economy perspective. The result proves the existence of this influence relationship, and the authors propose some suggestions to promote sustainable economic development.

This paper addresses the activity of industrial intelligence technologies in the labor market. The employment market is an important part of the circular economy, and it will benefit social development if the government provides appropriate guidance for social investment and industrial layout.

This study is one of the few studies which considered the impact of industrial robots on employment and wages from the perspective of different industries, and this is very important for the circular economy in the world. The results of this paper provide an instructive reference for government policymakers and other countries to stabilize the labor market and optimize human resources for sustainable economic development.

Of critical concern to the world is the need to reduce consumption and waste of natural resources. This study provides a multi-level exploration of the ways situational and transformational links between levels and challenges are related to the adoption and utilization of material flow cost accounting in Vietnam, to encourage green productivity.

Based on triangulation of public documents at different institutional levels and a set of semi-structured interviews, situational and transformational links and challenges for material flow cost accounting in Vietnam are examined using purposive and snowball sampling of key actors.

Using a multi-level framework the research identifies six situational and transformational barriers to implementation of material flow cost accounting and suggests opportunities to overcome these. The weakest links identified involve macro-to meso-situational and micro-to macro-transformational links. The paper highlights the dominance of meso-level institutions and lack of focus on micro transformation to cut waste and enable improvements in green productivity.

The paper identifies ways for companies in Vietnam to reduce unsustainability and enable transformation towards sustainable management and waste reduction.

The paper is the first to develop and use a multi-level/multi-time period framework to examine the take-up of material flow cost accounting to encourage transformation towards green productivity. Consideration of the Vietnamese case builds understanding of the challenges for achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 12, to help enable sustainable production and consumption patterns.