Between Late-Industrialisation and Globalisation: The Hybridisation of Labour Relations among Leading South Korean Firms

South Korea's (hereinafter Korea) labour relations illuminate the possibilities for the ‘hybridisation’ of non-liberal capitalism under globalisation. Unlike the well-known German and Japanese advanced non-liberal capitalisms, Korea appeared to be far less conducive to ‘hybridisation’. First, inclusive labour practices were not well developed. Second, it had introduced comprehensive economic liberalisation following the financial crash of 1998. Despite these unfavourable conditions, leading Korean firms have tended to maintain or even introduce non-liberal practices than to discard them. The resulting melding of non-liberal and liberal practices (‘hybridisation’) can be traced to three legacies of late-industrialisation: state inclination to intervene during crises; countervailing power of labour at leading enterprises; and the intensity of big business rivalry as a force for the assimilation of inclusive practices. The effects of these legacies in generating mixed practices will be illustrated using firm-level case studies from Korea's two leading export sectors. It will also be argued that Korea's pattern of labour relations hybridity is not conducive to convergence with extant forms of advanced capitalism. Hence Korea is more suitably denoted as a form of late-industrialisation hybrid capitalism whose experience is relevant to other late-developers as they achieve ‘advanced’ status.     

Labour inputs substitution during corporate restructuring: a translog model approach for US freight railroads

After deregulation in 1980, competitive pressures forced the large US freight railroads to reduce costs and restructure, resulting in an economic renaissance of the US railroad companies after years of poor financial conditions. The most striking restructuring measure receiving much attention was dramatic labour downsizing: until 2004 employment was reduced by 60%. But other overlooked measures are the significant restructuring of workforce composition, and important changes in railroads’ workplace organization practices and corporate culture. To better understand this successful occupational restructuring, I investigate labour inputs substitutional relationships by using a translog variable cost model. Labour is decomposed into six employee categories rather than traditional production–nonproduction breakdown to estimate inputs elasticities of substitution. The data investigated is a unique firm-level dataset on the US freight Class I Railroads, covering a 22-year period, which allows this fine-grained analysis. I also document railroad workplace organization practices relating to results and reflecting changes in railroads corporate culture. I find strong substitutability between managerial positions and transportation employees, pointing to achievement of better command and control of operations; a high degree of complementarity between the most skilled employee categories and the strongest substitute relationship between transportation and maintenance of Ways&Structures groups.     

就业能力、求职强度与就业绩效关系研究

知识与网络经济改变了传统的雇用方式,就业能力成为员工与企业竞争制胜的重要基础。本文将就业绩效细分为获得绩效与持续绩效,并以283个样本数据为基础,研究了就业能力、求职强度与就业绩效三者间的关系。结果表明:①个体就业能力及求职强度与获得绩效正相关;②个体的就业能力维度中,除了责任感与持续绩效正相关以外,其余能力均与持续绩效负相关;③个体求职强度对就业能力与获得绩效的关系起中介作用。文章还讨论了这一结果对管理实践的意义。     

Voluntary development of environmental management systems: motivations and regulatory implications

Encouraging firms to develop voluntarily more comprehensive environmental management systems (EMSs) is touted as a policy tool to augment mandatory environmental regulations. Using a unique dataset of environmental management practices of Japanese manufacturers and controlling for self-selection bias in survey responses, we find that proxies for regulatory pressures and consumer pressures are the most important factors that motivate firms toward more comprehensive EMSs. Despite the oft-claimed “voluntary” nature of EMS development, our results show that the government may have a role to play in both directly and indirectly affecting EMS development by firms.      

ICTs and time-span in technical efficiency gains. A stochastic frontier approach over a panel of Italian manufacturing firms

In this paper, in contrast to much of the existing literature dealing with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on labour productivity, we assess the relationship between ICT investments and technical efficiency (TE) using a stochastic frontier approach. We utilize a large panel dataset of Italian manufacturing firms over the period 1995–2006 and confirm the findings of the previous work on ICT and productivity. In addition, we test to what extent ICT investments influence the gap between firms and the production frontier; that is, how adoption of ICT influences the narrowing of the said gap. We also test the duration of the effects of adopting ICT on technical efficiency. Finally, our results indicate that ICT returns on TE are influenced by certain firm characteristics, most of which idiosyncratic, such as management practices, labour organization, research and development.     

Knowledge Management Capabilities for Steel Makers: A British-Japanese Corporate Alliance for Organizational Learning

This paper draws on a detailed case-study of a technical alliance between British Steel Strip Products (BSSP) and a leading Japanese steel company which was established to help the UK producer improve its product quality, its production control management and its customer links with Japanese car company transplants in the UK. The study is one of a series of comparisons of leading UK and Japanese manufacturing companies, from the steel, aerospace, telecoms and chemical industries. The overall project has been funded under the ESRC Innovation Programme. Evidence of the success of the alliance is illustrated in a series of graphs depicting the reduction in scrap and steel losses from particular BSSP mill sites and clear improvements in quality and productivity levels at these sites. The case-study traces these improvements back to specific management practices transferred from the Japanese producer as part of the alliance. Detailed evidence comes from the activities of 'Task Teams' which were assembled, with engineers from the Japanese companies as team members, to identify key quality problems at the mill sites and initiate procedural changes to overcome them. Using this empirical foundation the paper explores and develops a number of key concepts believed to be increasingly important within the broader analysis of organisational change and innovation at the firm level. The corporate 'capabilities' approach and 'knowledge-based' theories of the firm are brought together to help identify differences between the two firms and explain the resulting effects on company performance. The main focus in on 'knowledge management practices', including practices and procedures governing project management, inter-divisional coordination, management roles, budgeting and resource allocation, networking and information exchange, human resource development, employee motivation and so on, in each of the firms. The study highlights important differences between the two firms in terms of how specialist knowledge is developed, deployed, integrated and exploited or 'leveraged' for manufacturing innovation (quality control improvements at the mill sites). This also encourages intra-firm knowledge flows between technical support departments, R&D and production sites. The case study of the alliance represents an unusually clear illustration of how some knowledge management practices are more difficult to transfer between firms because they are more deeply 'embedded', that is, highly dependent on broader contextual factors (knowledge resources, organisational structure, culture etc.,) to operate effectively. Broader changes are more difficult to implement and usually take much longer. Moreover, as shown by other studies looking at the transferability of Japanese management practices, some changes, though leading to performance improvements, are probably not possible and/or desirable. The study therefore provides some insights into the capacity for and limits of various kinds of organisational innovation in the British firm.     

Macroeconomic,institutional, and sectoral determinants of outward foreign direct investment: Evidence from Japan

This paper empirically explores the determinants of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Japanese manufacturing sector. We estimate a gravity model of FDI for 30 host countries covering the period 2005–2017, using Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood to tackle the issue of zero-value observations. The results indicate that Japanese overseas investments are not only driven by traditional factors, such as market size, the yen real exchange rate, trade openness, differences in perception of corruption, and financial instability, but also by industry characteristics. In particular, we find that low technological industries characterized by growing labour costs are more likely to be relocated abroad. Furthermore, we demonstrate nonlinearities in the determinants of Japanese overseas investments depending on the host country's development, the host country's region, and the category of FDI implemented (vertical vs horizontal).     

WHERE IS THE JAPANESE ECONOMY HEADED?

Abstract.  The Japanese economy now seems to be emerging from the negative legacy of the collapse of the bubble in the 1990s. In order to assess where the economy is going, the paper reviews the decade-long stagnation and subsequent recovery in the context of globalization, with reference to policies of the Japanese government and management practices of the corporate sector. The rebirth of the Japanese economy will be forthcoming as long as ongoing policy efforts of the government and private-sector management endeavours continue, in a harmonious way and in the context of globalization.     

Internationalization and environmentally-related organizational learning among Chinese manufacturers

Globalization has caused Chinese manufacturers to develop quickly while simultaneously meeting green barriers to export products. Whether internationalization has led to improved environmental management practices among Chinese manufacturers is also a related question. Using survey data collected from 377 Chinese manufacturers in four industrial sectors, we find that international institutional pressures positively relate to domestic environmentalism of Chinese manufacturers and their adoption of environmentally-related organizational learning practices. Environmental learning is a viable method for Chinese manufacturers to ease their environmental burdens by replicating environmental management practices of their foreign counterparts. On the policy side, the Chinese government should follow other developed countries efforts to deploy environmental regulations and policies, further motivating environmental awareness and responses in the manufacturing industry.     

Price and nominal wage Phillips curves and the dynamics of distribution in Japan†

This study estimates two types of Phillips curves – the price Phillips curve and nominal wage Phillips curve – for the Japanese economy and analyses the institutional structure of the dynamics of effective demand and income distribution in each period from 1977 to 2007. The estimated results allow us to make the following three findings. First, the Japanese economy was a profit-led regime and a counter-cyclical wage share regime. The combination of regimes can make the dynamics of effective demand and income distribution unstable. Second, the dynamics of price and nominal wage do not reflect each other in Japan by labour–management cooperation. Finally, after 1997, the distributive regime in Japan switched from a counter-cyclical wage share to a pro-cyclical wage share regime because Japanese firms quickened their speeds of employment adjustment. As a result, the dynamics of effective demand and income distribution were stabilised.     

WHY IS JAPANESE WORKING TIME SO LONG?: WAGE-WORKING TIME CONTRACT MODELS*

Wage-working time contract models are used to analyse factors which can account for the long working hours of Japanese males. Although there are many factors which affect working time, our simulation shows that the clear gender division of labour in Japanese households is the most important. The simulation also shows that the wage gap and working time gap between large and small companies are explained mainly by the difference in the company's monopoly power, the worker's ability and the union's bargaining power. Moreover, if working time is not a bargaining issue and is determined by employers, it is longer than the case where it is a bargaining issue.     

Firm ownership and internal labour practices in a transition economy

One feature common to many post‐socialist transition economies is a relatively compressed wage structure in the state‐owned sector. We conjecture that this compressed wage structure creates weak incentives for work effort and worker skill acquisition and thus presents adverse consequences for the entire transition economy if a substantial portion of the labour force works in the state sector. We explore firm wage incentives and worker training, as well as other labour practices and outcomes, in a transition setting with matched firm and worker data collected in one of the largest provinces of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese state sector exhibits a compressed wage distribution in relation to privately owned firms with foreign ownership. State wage practices stress tenure over worker productivity and their wage policies result in flatter wage–experience profiles and lower returns to education. The state work force is in greater need of formal training, a need that is in part met through direct government financing. In spite of the opportunities for government financed training and at least partly due to inefficient worker incentives, state firms, by certain measures, exhibit lower levels of labour productivity. The private sector comparison group to state firms for all of these findings is foreign owned firms. The internal labour practices of foreign firms are more consistent with a view of profit‐maximizing firms operating with no political constraints. This is not the case for Vietnamese de novo private firms that exhibit much more idiosyncratic behaviour and whose labour practices are often indistinguishable from state firms. The exact reasons for this remain a topic of on‐going research yet we conjecture that various private sector constraints, including limited access to formal capital, play an important role.     

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN KOREA

The wage rate, labour productivity, and labour share are examined as they relate to changing industrial relations over the last four decades in the Korea. The results imply that the labour share is greater than that of Korea's competitive equilibrium in the 1990s. We analyse the effect of industrial relations on economic growth through a theoretical model comparing the growth rate of the competitive equilibrium with that of the bargaining equilibrium. The bargaining growth rate is lower than that of the competitive equilibrium. Among bargaining equilibria, the growth rate decreases as the labour share increases.     

Economic Competition,Policy Interdependence,and Labour Rights

Extant scholarship treats national policies concerning labour rights as a function of economic factors and yet neglects influences of policies among economically competing states. Relying on the policy interdependence theory, this study argues that labour rights policy in a state is dependent on its economic competitors’ labour policy decisions. It specifically maintains that the intensifying competition for foreign direct investment and exports as well as against imports channels negative externalities of deteriorating labour protection in competing states which drives expansive downward policy mimicking and leads to a global decline in labour rights – a race to the bottom. Utilising spatial econometric technique to analyse a new data on labour rights for the period 1994–2009, it finds that labour rights practices are interdependent among economic competitors and experience global deteriorations; whereas labour rights laws remain largely independent due to high policy and reputational costs of lowering them and show more fluctuations.     

现代混沌管理的渊源：理论·实践·文化

在第三次自然科学革命混沌的思想上形成的混沌理论,其涉及的范围几乎涵盖了所有的领域和学科。在混沌理论的基础上形成的管理,是自然科学和社会科学发展了几千年的成就积淀和创新。从原始混沌、传统混沌发展到现代混沌,进而形成混沌学,是混沌管理的理论渊源;将混沌理论引入管理实践而形成混沌管理,既是现代科学技术的发展变化所致,也是管理实践发展的结果,是混沌管理的实践渊源;从中国传统的混沌管理到西方现代的混沌管理,体现了中西方在哲学理念、价值观和人本主义观上的不同,更是中西方文化的差异,是混沌管理的文化渊源。     

Wage Differentials and Labour Supply of Married Women in Japan: Part-time and Informal Sector Work Opportunities

This paper studies the pattern of labour supply of Japanese married women. The study develops and tests a discrete work choice model with a differing level of fixed cost of work and equalizing wage differential s. This accounts for differences in work characteristics of the regular status and part-time status work at firms, the family and self-employment. A 20 to 30 per cent hourly wage differential was obser ved between work categories with control on skills, region and other variables. Different effects are studied of the numbe r and ages of children, a grandmother's presence and the wife's educational attainments on the category of work selected.
The data employed come from The Occupational History and Mobility Survey of Women 1983 (OHMS), conducted by the National Institute for Vocational and Occupational Research, and allow detailed wage regression and consideration of different work categories which were not feasible in previous works. Empirical regulari ties of the Japanese labour market, such as the absence of growth in labour participation for mothers with small children, are better explained when work categories are dealt with separately.     

Merger Activity and Employment: Evidence from the UK Mutual Sector

This paper approaches the performance consequences of mergers from a new direction; namely by analysing their impact on the acquiring firm's demand for labour. It employs a dynamic labour demand model, with an unbalanced panel of UK financial mutuals over the period 1981–1993. The data relate strictly to core financial intermediation activity and are thus particularly appropriate for the paper's purposes. The results are strongly supportive of an efficiency-enhancing interpretation of merger activity. A significant positive initial impact on the acquirer's demand for labour is followed by three years of significant negative effects, a result consistent with the acquisition and subsequent digestion of less efficient targets.     

日本企业劳资关系的演进——从“利益一致型”到“利益协调型”

二战后,在终身雇佣、年功序列和企业内工会等人力资源管理制度框架下,日本企业与员工结成了"命运共同体",共同分担经营风险、分享盈余利润,形成了一种"利益一致型"劳资关系。但近十几年来,长期的经济停滞迫使企业普遍采用了强制性解雇、短期雇佣和成果主义考核等管理措施,破坏了传统劳资关系的长期性与稳定性,淡化了员工对企业的归属感与忠诚心,劳资对立的趋势日渐凸显,双方利益由一致逐步走向分化。劳资关系将由"利益一致型"演进为在对立中求合作、在合作中求制衡的"利益协调型"。     

Wage Adjustments and Labour Market Systems: A Cross-Country Analysis*

Evidence is presented on how well alternative systems of wage determination facilitate disaggregate labour market adjustment. Tests of statistical causality are used to relate labour market pressure to relative wage changes. The conclusion is that rates of change of relative wages are determined independently of the microeconomic market balance. This result holds irrespective of the institutional form of the wage-fixing system.