The Current State of the Japanese Economy and Challenges for Japanese Management: An Overview

Abstract

The success of Japanese companies in the world markets since the 1970s has attracted widespread attention. What became known as ‘the Japanese management model’ was the first non-Western model to question the supremacy of Western approaches to management, and its principles and practices were imitated in many ways in a number of other Asian countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. But ‘learning from Japan’ was not a phenomenon limited to Asian nations. Many Western corporations also adopted several aspects of Japanese management, particularly with regard to production processes, and ‘Japanese management’ developed into a subdiscipline of management studies.