Search results

This research aims to explore whether or not the widely adopted diversity management strategy of Japanese firms aids female self-initiated expatriates' careers. Japan is famous for its male-dominated society (e.g. Hofstede, 2003), which seems to conflict with the recent fading of this strategy in Japanese firms. To what extent does the strategy work for Japanese organisations and how do female self-initiated expatriates perceive it?

An interview-based qualitative methodology is used to collect testimony from female self-initiated expatriates who are currently working fulltime in Japanese firms. The interviews were conducted with 22 female expats who come from 13 different countries.

Although the strategy aims for equality, gender still matters in Japanese society and within firms. The interviews found that male-centred rules set out every single step for local employees' behaviours. “Male things” are defined everywhere at work, which makes female expats sceptical of Japan and Japanese firms. The dynamics of the male-based rule seem to eliminate female expats from the centre of organisational society.

Discussion over female expatriates has been increasing due to the frequent movement of international labour to Japan. Also gender fairness has been pushed by the international community, including Japanese. These factors, however, have yet to be explored in the context of the Japanese workplace for female international expatriates. What do we know about female expats working in Japan? What does the male dominance mean for female expats? This study provides an initial insight on female and expatriate diversity management in Japan.

Against the backdrop of the convergence and divergence debate in comparative management studies, this study aims to explore Chinese-style management and proposes the husband-housewife-patriarchy (HHP) model of management, emphasizing the uniqueness of Chinese management practices that are differentiated from Western- and Japanese-oriented paradigms while advocating a progressive and practical approach to understanding and applying these principles [1].

This study combines a “bottom-up” and “top-down” logic of analysis to reexamine the general managerial approaches, with particular attention toward human resource management as a stream within the whole management spectrum across China, the USA, Europe and Japan, reaching a typological representation of the above prototypes, which is coined as the HHP model of management. In doing so, this paper proffers a novel lens for revisiting these models and advancing management innovation in China.

Chinese-style management is characterized by an array of unique approaches diverging from Western and Japanese models. The HHP management model is presented as a new framework for reinterpreting these distinctions and encouraging management innovation within China, highlighting the potential of Chinese management practices in contributing to global management knowledge.

This paper offers novel perspectives on Chinese-style management and introduces the HHP management model, enriching the discourse on comparative management and local innovation in the managerial arena.

Applying the concept of “entrepreneur managers” from dynamic capabilities theory to the question of how some Japanese managers develop and use their relationships with foreign investors, this article explores organizational contexts in which Japanese managers use foreign shareholders as resources to enhance firm capabilities in the global marketplace, deploy assets effectively and implement changes to traditional organizational customs. The article asks why and how some top managers implemented institutional changes and adopted customs that are common in the shareholder-based system while others did not.

We conducted qualitative interviews with 11 inverstor relations (IR) managers of large, listed Japanese firms in Kyoto and Tokyo.

First, by inviting a hedge fund partner and using their human capital and social capital, a Japanese CEO committed to strengthening his firm’s competencies in the global market and introduced changes that are common in the shareholder-based system. Second, a CEO with an MBA degree and exceptional communication skills in English and Japanese dedicated himself to executing much of the strategic advice suggested to him by foreign shareholders and altered some of his firm’s traditional Japanese management practices. Third, even though many Japanese firms welcomed and used foreign shareholders as advisors to help them streamline and/or acquire firm assets, their top leaders’ implementation of organizational changes was limited. Fourth, the top leaders of family-owned firms were reluctant to initiate dialogue with foreign investors.

This article adds some useful organizational context to existing scholarship on institutional theory by examining Japanese leaders’ strategic management in their relations with foreign investors. Using the concept of dynamic capabilities, it addresses the role of innovative strategic managers in firms’ institutional changes.

This research investigates the politics of smiling as a central driver for employees to navigate power dynamics within the prevailing discourse at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Existing critical management studies emphasize power in organizational language, often neglecting the role of employees’ emotions in sustaining discourse. This paper examines employees’ smiles as tools for legitimizing (sensegiving) and interpreting (sensemaking) discourse. It explores how the use of their emotional display influenced the outcome of the company’s attempt to legitimize discourse. This research divides the discourse process into five phases: formation, codification, implementation, monitoring and adaptation.

Using the critical sensegiving and sensemaking approach, this paper discusses how employees’ interpretations of corporate policies shape the perpetuation of dominant discourse and outcomes. Data were collected through the author’s long-term participant observation in the Hong Kong branches of Japanese retailers.

The formation phase discusses the emergence of a dominant discourse favoring Japanese practices in the company’s Hong Kong operations. Codification involves the conceptualization of standard smiles in customer service policies. In practice (implementation, monitoring and adjustment), employee smiles serve as tools for negotiating power—shaping careers, earnings and shift preferences. This paper argues that this discourse shapes organizational norms while employees’ sensemaking influences the discourse implementation. Furthermore, this paper highlights the transnational impact of Japanese culture in Hong Kong, which has shaped the way Japanese top management and local employees interpret the dominant discourse.

This study demonstrates the importance of discussing the display of emotions and employees’ intentions to understand their impact on the outcome of discourse implementation. This study also reiterates the significance of discussing the influence of one culture on another to understand the broader social context that affects the perpetuation of discourse.

After completion of the case study, the students will be able to understand the importance of being culturally savvy when working in a culturally diverse environment and managing people from different cultures; critically reflect on the risks resulting from the absence of a clear direction from the company’s top management regarding unifying corporate values and a diversity policy for cooperation across cultures; be aware of best practices in implementing diversity management (DM) initiatives in the company; and learn that changes in the strategic orientation (i.e. focus on automation projects) must be cascaded down to hard elements of structures, processes and systems, as well as to soft elements of skills, staff and management style.

The Kuwaiti branch of a Japanese corporation specialising in control systems and instruments, Rising Sun IT, hired a German professional, Alex, to handle the increasing demand for automation from customers. This recruitment followed several unsuccessful attempts by the company to deliver more advanced automation solutions. Recognising the need to adapt to Kuwaiti customer requirements or risk losing market share, Japanese management understood the importance of transforming their engineering staff. Failure to achieve this next automation step would result in a steady decline in market share and ultimately impact the company’s survival. However, Alex, who was supposed to lead automation projects, was confronted with opposition from the Indian engineering staff and managers. He was not able to find common ground with the staff and perceived issues such as lack of communication, delays in work schedules, missed deadlines and high levels of absenteeism, as a sign of low work morale. Although he tried to increase the awareness of his supervisor and other managers by informing them repeatedly about the problems regarding employee behaviours, his interventions went unheard. He felt ousted by his fellow colleagues and the other employees. Besides, from Alex’s point of view, the Japanese top management did not provide clear directions to the staff and explicit support to Alex in his efforts. This case study highlights three dimensions of Alex’s problem with establishing and maintaining working relationships with other people in the company:▪ Alex’s cultural “blindness” and ignorance of differences in work behaviours that ultimately led to his inability to build solid and trustful relationships with other employees. The case study demonstrates Germany’s performance-oriented and individual-centric culture versus India’s family- and community-oriented culture and the Japanese employees’ strongly hierarchical and company loyalty-oriented culture.▪ Lack of support from the Japanese top management to Alex, which is connected with a wider problem of the lack of a systematic strategic approach to managing a culturally diverse workforce. The case study pinpoints the rhetoric–reality gap in DM in the company, where the diversity, equity and inclusion programme and corporate values were applied only formally and had little attention from the leaders as well as non-managerial employees.▪ Employee resistance to change: The lack of positive communication from the top management level in the company regarding automation projects and the lack of support for Alex’s mission in the company resulted in steady resistance to executing projects, which endangered the company’s survival in the market. Also, one part of Alex’s problem with building a working relationship with the Indian engineering staff was based on the fact that others perceived him as the automation “change agent” – an advocate and catalyst of an undesirable change connected with adverse consequences on employment in the Indian community.

This case is intended for discussion in undergraduate management and business study programmes.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 6: Human resource management.

Within international human resources management scholarship, the importance of trust for good employee relations is well-recognized. This paper aims to deepen understanding of extant intercultural communication (IC) studies on trust, with practical implications for globalizing organizations, by surfacing particularities of a developed Asia (Japanese) subsidiary in developing Asia (Thailand). It thereby contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on International Partnerships (UN SGD 17) and decent work (UN SDG 8).

The paper draws on first-hand interviews with Thai executives of varying responsibilities at a Japanese manufacturer to understand how IC can lead to trust failure in globalizing organizations. It follows a subjectivist, social constructivist epistemology to deepen understanding.

The findings break ground toward an innovative understanding of how Thai executives’ expectations might be betrayed, by surfacing a novel conceptualization of trust failure.

Research is limited to the case examined and the limitation is recognized within the paper. This paper offers an important theoretical refinement – a novel understanding and contribution to how trust might falter.

The findings have important practical implications for international organizations to be wary of power (and especially inequalities), insecurity and the resultant need for empathetic interpersonal relations in Thailand. Similar insights could be potentially relevant in other developed–developing Asia dyadic contexts as well because of the broad-based design of the current case study. Recommendations for staff selection are offered.

The study directly relates to global society’s sustainability objectives, especially decent work that targets a safe working environment for all.

The paper offers in-depth original insights into individual business executives’ values for trust creation in intercultural international organizations. It addresses the paucity of lived experience accounts of trust “failures” in Developed-Developing Asia contexts, valuable to realizing UN SDG 17 that pertains to international partnerships.

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.

In this paper, the editors argue that management accounting research should seek to expand to examine the broader ecosystem of information sources that influence organizational performance. The editors introduce the concept of the management accounting ecosystem as a means of linking discrete management accounting research topics to the broader environment in which organizations operate. By doing this, a stronger connection can be established between management accounting research and management accounting practice. The goal is to encourage more cross-disciplinary research that provides a better understanding of the ecosystem in which management accounting practitioners operate. The editors encourage researchers to submit studies to “Advances in Management Accounting” that evaluate the effectiveness of new management accounting information sources and the techniques used to analyze them in the broader ecosystem to enhance the effectiveness of management accounting practices. By exploring the wider information sources within the management accounting ecosystem, future management accounting research can become more innovative and better address the decision-making needs of organizational members.

This study aims to investigate four internal (organisational structure, quality of information technology, business strategy and market orientation) and two external (competition intensity and perceived environmental uncertainty) contextual factors affecting the use of production planning and control accounting techniques (PPC), as well as the impact of PPC usage on organisational competitiveness.

Seven major PPC techniques were investigated, namely: attribute costing, lifecycle costing, quality costing, target costing, value-chain costing, activity-based costing and activity-based management. By deploying a multi-informant strategy, a structured questionnaire was used to gather survey data from 129 senior accounting, finance and production personnel of publicly quoted manufacturing companies in Nigeria.

The results, using structural equation modelling, show that market orientation is the strongest determinant of PPC usage. The inability of competition intensity and perceived environmental uncertainty to notably affect PPC usage suggests that external environmental pressure to use PPC is weak. Although PPC can engender organisational competitiveness, their interactive usage yields optimal results.

The study contributes to knowledge by: (i) presenting evidence that although PPC techniques can engender organisational competitiveness, it is their interactive usage that yields optimal results; (ii) empirically demonstrating that contextual factors influence PPC usage in line with the contingency theory; and (iii) validating the diffusion of innovation theory that organisations will typically deploy PPC techniques because of their relative advantage of improving organisational competitiveness.

This paper aims to identify and discuss insights from the business model field on the creation and delivery of value to customers that provide new thinking in relation to the strategic management accounting field.

The customer emphases exhibited in parts of the extant strategic management accounting literature are highlighted and amplified using insights from the business model literature, including those relating to value propositions, customer value creation and delivery and meeting customers’ value expectations.

The paper demonstrates that in addition to providing valuable insights for accounting to management, an extended strategic management accounting concept enables accounting and reporting to customers, now identified as major stakeholders, in the context of integrated reporting.

Through its customer resonances, the paper affirms strategic management accounting’s practical utility for organisations seeking a strong position in highly competitive marketplaces, via the addition of a focus on accounting to customers.

The paper’s use of insights from the business model literature further reinforces the view that strategic management accounting potentially constitutes a pivotal development within both managerial and financial accounting and reporting.