Introduction

Despite the emergence of the manufacturing strategy concept over thirty years ago (Skinner, 1969), there is still a recurrent trend in manufacturing management towards the adoption of best practices (Pilkington, 1998, 1999). The ‘Japanisation’ of production systems, in particular, was seen as a key means of generating industrial success in the 1980s and 1990s. Japanese practices and the resulting ‘lean’ mantra were moved from being societally bounded to having global reach, as Japanese products spread and Japanese TNCs moved out of Japan to set up production operations internationally. This shift mirrored the cyclical upswing in the Japanese economy relative to America and Europe, and produced a search for an explanation of success that was learnable and/or movable and not simply connected to Japanese territory.

This chapter explores the validity of a single lean system through the identification of the different operating methods found in Japanese car manufacturers during the period, and so challenges the notion and value of the best-practice approach. Data from US and UK industry show a lack of advancement from adopting Japanisation and so following the best-practice route. The transition of practices from Japan can be viewed as a transfer of structurally bounded strategies into a dominant system, and, in essence, the invention of ‘lean’ is a process of abstraction and conceptualisation that is able to reach a willing audience largely because of Japanese economic success.