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As employees in the lower ranks of a Japanese company advance through the levels of management and seniority their role in day-to-day kaizen activities shifts from that of directly improving their own job, operations and surroundings to guiding, educating and facilitating understanding and practice. The emphasis of kaizen to the employee during career progression changes in an embedded, sequential and predictable manner. To a new employee, kaizen is a process to be implemented, something that is visible and largely provided through company training and job manuals, while not necessarily being fully understood. To the senior manager, however, one who has advanced up the corporate ladder, kaizen is tacit knowledge and accumulated experiences, and is seen as being more than just reducing costs, increasing productivity and decreasing lead times. At this point, kaizen becomes something invisible, something that can produce real influence on both the company’s profitability and the manager’s reputation. Consequently, what kaizen is actually changes from being a duty associated with employment to a matter of personal, group, collective, and organizational responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanism underpinning the transfer of kaizen (acknowledgement and exercise) in the Japanese workplace that results in it being sustained across multiple.

Data were collected from research participants (n = 53) through a mixed-method multi-language field design comprising questionnaires and unstructured interviews conducted in genba, the workplaces of five domain-name multinational companies in Japan. Multi-level statistical analysis identified two largely mutually exclusive generational groups.

During their late 40s, employees were found to transfer their understanding of kaizen between the two forms. At this age, employees were identified to shift from being student to teacher; follower to leader; and disciple to sensei. This study identified how kaizen shifts from one generation to another; when kaizen shifts through the change in responsibility of employees; and changes in the understanding and practice that creates sustained business excellence.

Importantly, the study reveals how kaizen itself is a sustainable business activity in the workplace, one that Western business is struggling to emulate.

The purpose of this study is to address a critical gap in the existing literature on business excellence implementation. While various studies have examined different aspects of business excellence, there is still a lack of comprehensive research on the optimal organizational excellence architecture (OEA) for an award-winning business excellence journey. The absence of a unified framework has led to inconsistent practices across organizations. The aim of this research based on data collected from 50 organizations across 17 countries is to address this gap and present a refined OEA model.

This study employed quantitative and qualitative data collection methods. Member organizations from the Global Excellence Model (GEM) Council participated through an online survey administered via the Qualtrics software platform. Quantitative data were analyzed using the SPSS and Microsoft Excel software tools, while content analysis techniques were applied to the qualitative data to gain detailed insights.

The findings refine and extend the OEA model. These contributions lead to a refined OEA definition and open avenues for future research, enriching the current understanding of BE implementation.

This study introduces a novel concept of OEA to the literature on business excellence implementation. The refined OEA model provides a fresh perspective on the critical components necessary for an award-winning business excellence journey. This research offers significant value to both practitioners and academics by presenting a unified approach to BE implementation, effectively addressing the previously identified gap in BE research.

For the past three decades, the dominant economic policy environment across the Anglosphere has assumed that industrial performance results from increasing national competitiveness. The US Government and others have extensively used the tools of deregulation that emerged from the influential frameworks of Michael Porter and the Chicago School. That both the contributing analysis and attendant policy environment largely neglected the very source of national disadvantage, mostly Japanese industry in the 1970s and 1980s, remains surprising. What was going on in Japan at the time, and to some extent continues today, remains largely hidden. The aim of this paper is to expose one source of Japan’s influential competitive advantage – the human resource.

This paper, through the translation of a Japanese-language paper by Professor Emeritus Masaki Saruta, introduces the Japanese phenomenon of managed education in Aichi Prefecture, home of the Toyota Motor Corporation, and provides insight into the lifestyles of the Japanese workers who live and work in corporate castle towns that feed Toyota. Inductive content analysis was used to identify four themes that can be identified as the strategies used to produce a homogenous pool of labor that sustains the Toyota Way philosophy and Toyota Production System.

The content analysis identified four major themes: Toyota’s abnormal level of influence over local government, a unique education system of education management, a closed labor market and the homogeneity of labor. It is only now that business leaders in the Anglosphere are able to comprehend the vastness and depth of inculcation and nurturing policies of Toyota and other Japanese industrial giants – something business leaders in the Anglosphere today can only dream. It now becomes evident that Chandler’s visible hand remains alive and well, but critical drivers of its success in Japan and Toyota were largely invisible to the West.

The research required the knowledge of one of Saruta’s works that is only published in Japanese, and therefore, inaccessible to researchers in the Anglosphere. The translation process and development of themes is reported in detail. The findings are then located in the broad context of national competitive advantage.

With the insight presented in this paper, business and government leaders may now be empowered to implement policies and practices to nurture a pool of labor more conducive with the organizational strategic policy. While leaders in the Anglosphere are able to implement policy, there also remains a new threat to economic sovereignty – the nurturing of human resources in the dormitories, refectories and shopping malls of industrial China.

The development of a company-focused workforce to support corporate castle towns, one of the sources of national advantage, has been identified in this paper. The social implications are twofold. First, in Japan, the nature and influence of these towns are accepted and heralded by the community. Second, outside of Japan, and especially across the Anglosphere, these towns are a major source of competitive advantage.

Through the translation of original research published in the Japanese-language medium, this research provides otherwise inaccessible insight into the inner workings and effectively the “black box” of what was Japan Inc. in an era when business people in the West were playing catchup. As the debate on globalization extends to sovereignty across the Anglosphere, it is beholden on the academic community to provide effective solutions for industrial competitiveness.

Research studies on offshoring and reshoring have predominantly focused on the home company, widely ignoring the offshored company in the host country. The host company's influence and contribution have been unseen. This research explores how the host company responds to the home company's location decisions to maintain the dyadic relationship.

An exploratory case study in China was conducted to examine the host company's response to reshoring. The case company has two Japanese parent companies that acted for the emergence of reshoring drivers. Primary and secondary data were collected and analysed through thematic analysis. The host company's response strategies to the home company's relocation decisions were identified and explored.

The findings reveal that four strategies, identified here as being cost control, market expansion, knowledge seeking and relationship bonding, were implemented by the host company. The importance of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and knowledge transfer is also emphasised within these strategies.

This research identified active and practical strategies conducted by the host company to maintain a cooperative relationship with the home company(ies). Instead of encountering a passive response from the host company, the home company may consider working with the host to overcome difficulties caused by emerging reshoring drivers and create an outcome beneficial to both.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to study manufacturing reshoring from the perspective of the host company. It provides a new perspective to understanding this phenomenon.

To explore the cultural context of Indigenous family entrepreneurs and to apply to them the concept of n-Culturals, thus contributing to validating the concept.

Interview data collected from Wayuu entrepreneurs in La Guajira region of Colombia and from Māori entrepreneurs in the Rotorua region of New Zealand were analyzed qualitatively. The analysis primarily focused on Wayuu entrepreneurs, with the results for Māori entrepreneurs used for comparison, to help to interpret the Wayuu data.

For Wayuu entrepreneurs, family members play a range of crucial roles in enterprise operations, with the family and the kin-centered local Indigenous community emerging as an informal organization surrounding the enterprise. Family is the source of Indigenous culture, while the mainstream culture is centered on global Western business culture, rather than the culture of the country. The Indigenous entrepreneurs integrate the values of the two cultures in managing their enterprises, thus acting as n-Cultural. Māori entrepreneurs who managed enterprises with a strong Indigenous character were similar in this respect to Wayuu entrepreneurs.

As n-Culturals integrating the values of Indigenous culture and the mainstream culture, Indigenous entrepreneurs develop valuable traits, becoming a valuable component of the human capital in their regions, even when their enterprises fail.

Existing research on multicultural individuals is largely limited to immigrants and expatriates. By characterizing Indigenous family entrepreneurs as n-Culturals, the present study contributes to validating the concept and opens the way for further research on how Indigenous entrepreneurs manage their multicultural identities.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a definitive and insightful working definition of kaizen for practitioners and academics in the West through which they may better understand the kaizen phenomenon and its intangible but critical underpinning philosophy.

A phenomenological study of the utility of kaizen within in the bounds of active kaizen environments in name Japanese industrial organisations was conducted over a three-year period in Japan. The research explored how Japanese workers acknowledge, exercise, identify and diffuse kaizen in a sustainable manner.

Kaizen is found to be a broad philosophical approach to work that serves different purposes for different members of the organisation, where no universal definition appears to exist yet differing ideologies are tolerated. Kaizen in Japan has a considerably deep meaning: it channels worker creativity and expressions of individuality into bounded environments, and creates an energy that drives a shared state of mind among employees to achieve proactive changes and innovation in the workplace.

This paper competently bridges the Japanese-Anglosphere cultural divide in social and business contexts. It contributes to the development of practitioner understanding of the utility of kaizen in Japan through unhindered cross-cultural research methodology, enabled by researcher competency and fluency in Japanese language and culture.

This study aims to assess the direct relationships between internal support and job satisfaction and voluntary assistance and their indirect connections through work–family conflict among Nigerian police officers.

Survey data were collected from police officers in a midsized state police command in Ebonyi state in Nigeria. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to assess the connections between supervisor support, peer support, work–family conflict, job satisfaction and voluntary assistance.

Police officers with stronger supervisor and co-worker support are more inclined to express higher job satisfaction, whereas such support is not linked to officers' willingness to help fellow officers. Work–family conflict mediates the relationship between co-worker support and voluntary assistance. Stronger peer support is accompanied by higher work–family conflict, which then is linked to greater helping behavior.

Despite many studies on police job satisfaction, research on correlates of job satisfaction in an African context remains severely under-investigated. This study represents one of the first attempts to assess police proactive helping behavior and job satisfaction in Nigeria.

Donald Macpherson Group have acquired Briggs & Townsend Ltd. from Johnson & Firth Brown (JFB) for a total cash consideration of £1.8m to be paid over one year.