著者

Yusuke Tsukamoto

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0210115a, (Released:2021-02-11)

参考文献数

15

被引用文献数

10

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COVID-19 has accelerated the spread of telecommuting in Japan. In past studies regarding telecommuting, it was proved to be the result of i-deals, so it was discussed in the context of location flexibility i-deals (LFi-deals). The spread of COVID-19, however, has given rise to semi-compulsory telecommuting. Therefore, this study takes three groups: Group A, which continues to work at the office as before; Group B, which has started to telecommute (inexperienced telecommuters) so that telecommuting is regarded as semi-compulsory; and Group C, which has experience with telecommuting (experienced telecommuters) so that telecommuting is the result of making LFi-deals; and investigates the relationship that telecommuting has with the degree of self-determination (DSD) and productivity. Our analysis found that between Group B and Group C, which were both telecommuting, both DSD and productivity were significantly higher for Group C which has LFi-deals compared with Group B, for which telecommuting is semi-compulsory. However, DSD and productivity were higher for Group B than for Group A, so it is possible that starting to telecommute leads to more LFi-deals, a greater DSD, and higher productivity.

著者

Zhongqi Wang Youngkyo Suh

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0201201a, (Released:2021-01-17)

参考文献数

11

被引用文献数

1

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In the fast-growing Chinese heavy commercial vehicle market, it has been claimed that the rule is “manufacturers cannot survive unless they exceed an annual production scale of 10,000 units.” However, Japanese automakers GAC Hino Motors Company (GHMC) and Qingling Motors have been producing a profit in the Chinese market even though their production scale is less than 10,000 units. This has been due to the adaptation of a Japanese production system that can maintain a constant productivity standard even when dealing with small-scale production. However, the success of this Japanese production system has been due to the development of a method of fostering multiskilled workers in accordance with the actual circumstances in China.

著者

Sungwoo Byun

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0201111a, (Released:2020-12-11)

参考文献数

9

被引用文献数

2

---

Only a small portion out of –200 steel-makers in the world can produce high-grade steel such as hot-dip galvanized steel sheets and directional electrical steel sheets. For equipment-related industry such as steel industry, technical knowledge is embodied in their equipment; thus, technology transfer and catch-up are somewhat easy. However, for high-grade steel production, steel-makers in emerging countries equipped with large-scale capital investment and state-of-the-art equipment capital investment continued to struggle. The reason for this is when a new process is added to the existing process and not just the added process, the operational parameters of all processes must be coordinated. Thus, when a number of processes increases, it leads to a massive number of combinations of operational parameters to be coordinated, thus requiring time to acquire knowledge patterns.

著者

Masayuki Hatta

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200908a, (Released:2020-12-07)

参考文献数

11

被引用文献数

9

---

Recently, online black markets and anonymous virtual currencies have become the subject of academic research, and we have gained a certain degree of knowledge about the dark web. However, as terms such as deep web and dark net, which have different meanings, have been used in similar contexts, discussions related to the dark web tend to be confusing. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss the differences between these concepts in an easy-to-understand manner, including their historical circumstances, and explain the technology known as onion routing used on the dark web.

著者

Mitsuhiro Fukuzawa

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0201012a, (Released:2020-11-11)

参考文献数

32

被引用文献数

2

---

In extant studies regarding value stream mapping (VSM) and cross-functional integration in Western journals, there is a deviation from the essence of lean production and flow management, which aim at overall optimization by focusing on the flow of the entire value chain as well as material and information flow, and empirical studies based on the actual state of material and information flow have not been sufficiently conducted. To proceed with the overall optimization of the material and information flow in the supply and value chain—with progress in globalization and digitalization as seen in recent Japanese manufacturing companies—it is necessary to return to basics to grasp the “actual state of the flow” by focusing on the entire material and information flow and to conduct empirical studies on factors contributing to these flows.

著者

Takeaki Wada

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0201013a, (Released:2020-11-11)

参考文献数

15

被引用文献数

1

---

In closed innovation (CI), each firm does R&D on its own; however, on the other hand, in open innovation (OI), companies use knowledge from external sources when necessary or let other firms use their proprietary technologies. Chesbrough (2003) pointed out the effectiveness of OI. OI is accompanied by (1) outsourcing dilemma that prevents a firm from getting a competitive advantage when rival firms can also gain the knowledge from same external sources, (2) integrator's dilemma, which occur when firms sell parts to assemblers that produce and sell the same product, thus becoming formidable rivals, and (3) modularity trap, whereby when it is necessary to redesign the total product structure due to radical product innovations, the firm which selected open modular architecture and OI cannot respond because knowledge has dispersed among firms. OI is not necessarily the most efficient choice when these dilemmas or traps exist.

著者

Kaoru Tsuda Hidenori Sato

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200901a, (Released:2020-11-07)

参考文献数

16

被引用文献数

3

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Much research has been conducted on the role of the middle manager; however, most of the studies in research on this topic have focused on the middle manager's managerial work. However, upon surveying 2,183 managers at Japanese firms, we found that 87% of managers were actually engaged in nonmanagerial work. Furthermore, in extreme cases where middle managers responded that there was either not enough or too much non-managerial work, team performance was poor, while in cases where middle managers did an appropriate amount of nonmanagerial work, team performance was good.

著者

Daisuke Kosaka Hidenori Sato

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200911a, (Released:2020-11-01)

参考文献数

25

被引用文献数

5

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Engagement as a concept is gaining attention in research and management practices. However, there are several types of engagement depending on whether the focus is on work and jobs or companies and organizations. In this paper, we demonstrate the following three points based on comparative analysis of the concepts of work engagement and employee engagement: (a) Both terms are used with the same frequency in academic journals in the field of management, but non-academic sources consistently use “employee engagement,” while medical and nursing articles use “work engagement.” (b) “Work engagement” may be used in this way because the term originated in research of burnout among nurses working in hospitals. (c) While much research does not adequately differentiate the two concepts, they should be treated as distinct concepts due to their distinct origins and the content they measure.

著者

Mitsuhiro Fukuzawa

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.19, no.5, pp.207-225, 2020-10-15 (Released:2020-10-15)

参考文献数

88

被引用文献数

2

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Studies of the value stream mapping (VSM) in Western journals report that leveraging VSM as a lean tool results in performance improvements. However, in these articles, VSM is functioning as a tool for partial optimization, attempting to identify and resolve bottlenecks in individual functions and divisions, primarily in production activities. For that reason, the greater the degree to which VSM underpins success, the more it deviates from the original essence of lean production and flow management, promoting overall optimization by focusing on the flows across the value chain, and potentially leading to poorer performance in the overall value flows up to the customer.

著者

Masami Abe

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200903a, (Released:2020-09-25)

参考文献数

14

被引用文献数

2

---

It has been reported that the use of key phrases that all staff share a common understanding of is effective for integration inside an organization. At the Rakuwakai Otowa Hospital, however, integration failed due to the long-standing use of the terms “for the patient” and “patient first.” The staff had assigned different meanings depending on their profession to these terms based on which they had built successful track records for their profession. That experience acted as an inertia preventing changes in attitudes and behaviors and ended up accelerating individually optimal activities for each profession. It is not merely a matter of staff across units simply using the same key phrases; it is important to reduce the ambiguity of the key phrases through behavior.

著者

Kiyohiro Oki

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200721a, (Released:2020-09-09)

参考文献数

23

被引用文献数

5

---

This paper identifies the national factors related to the number of COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 deaths in each country using the CAGE framework in the international business field. Multiple regression analyses are conducted at multiple time points, with the number of COVID-19 infections and COVID-19 in each country as the dependent variables and cultural factors, administrative and political factors, geographic factors, and economic factors of each country as the independent variables. The analyses reveal the following four points: (1) The cultural, geographical, and economic factors are not significantly associated with the number of COVID-19 infections or deaths. (2) The Administrative and political factors (corruption, government information policy) are negatively associated with the number of COVID-19 infections. (3) None of the factors are associated with the number of COVID-19 deaths. (4) The significance of the correlation between independent and dependent variables changes with time.

著者

Suolinga Suolinga Heejin Kim

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200804a, (Released:2020-09-03)

参考文献数

29

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This paper intends to understand the overseas business expansion of a Japanese SME that is facilitated by strategic management of technical interns (TIs), a type of foreign migrant labor in Japan. We challenge the current prejudices and narrow view on the role of TIs by introducing a unique case wherein a rural SME utilized TIs as strategic human resources. Furthermore, we highlighted the positive influence of TIs on the gradual insiderization in foreign markets and development of new business opportunities.

著者

Kenichi Kuwashima Nobuyuki Inamizu Nobuo Takahashi

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200621a, (Released:2020-08-03)

参考文献数

42

被引用文献数

5

---

The concept of ambidexterity and particularly the concept of exploitation are ambiguous. March (1991), a study that became the theoretical basis for several research studies, asserted that exploitation has a trade-off relationship with exploration including innovation, and on the basis of this aspect, Levinthal and March (1993) proposed the myopia of learning. Nevertheless, Levinthal later modeled exploitation that can be called as innovation. Some argued that exploration and exploitation are bipolar on one axis, and some argued that they are two orthogonal axes. In this study, we proposed using Lévi-Strauss’ “bricolage” instead of “exploitation.” This bricolage is a concept of making do with the tools and materials at hand (performing innovation), and bricolage and exploration are used together with ambidexterity being the normal form. We examine this aspect by using Japan’s response to the current Coronavirus disease pandemic as an example.

著者

Ayako Aizawa

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.19, no.3, pp.111-125, 2020-06-15 (Released:2020-06-15)

参考文献数

24

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Fuel economy competition has heated up as a result of the oil crises of the 1970s, the environmental issues occurring since the 1990s, and the Japanese government’s economic policies, so that fuel economy has become a key competition index. However, for engineers who measure fuel economy, it is (i) a vague and unstable metric that fluctuates because of a number of factors and (ii) a quality that does not affect safety and so is not subject to recall. Competitive pressure regarding fuel economy led to arbitrary measurements. This eventually became normalized, and since 2016, cases of organizational corruption in the Japanese automotive industry have been uncovered one after another.

著者

Wei Huang

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200429a, (Released:2020-06-11)

参考文献数

12

被引用文献数

2

---

Company A’s Project R is a freemium-model game business wherein the company makes money by (a) obtaining a large number of users who play its game essentially for free and (b) converting a small number of them into paying users. In Project R, paying ability boosting items were added to increase profits. Doing this initially increased monthly sales by 20%; however, after two months, the playing time of existing non-paying users declined, and more new non-paying users abandoned the game as well. It seems that the addition of paying ability boosting items could shorten a game’s life span by destroying the balance between (a) and (b) and causing a long-term decline in revenue. This paper runs a simulation to verify this.

著者

Kenichi Kuwashima

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200422a, (Released:2020-06-05)

参考文献数

30

被引用文献数

3

---

Large-scale university–industry collaborations that are worth some 10 billion yen and run for 10 years have begun to appear in Japan since the mid-2010s. This paper focuses on the drug development project being conducted by Chugai Pharmaceutical Co, Ltd. and Osaka University, which is a pioneering case of this kind of collaboration, and explores the background of how this project came to be. For the companies involved in university–industry collaborations, the most important point for consideration is generally whether or not they will achieve results (from the university’s contributions) that are sufficient to justify their investment. For Chugai Pharmaceutical, the deciding factor in making its 10-billion-yen investment was that Osaka University had been selected for the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) and had built up research capabilities to make a sufficient contribution to Chugai. In that sense, we could say that this collaboration came into being because of the government’s support in building the innovation base and because of switching over from government sponsorship to corporate sponsorship after the operation of the base was on track. This so-called government-support-based, large-scale university–industry collaboration is a potential role model for university–industry collaborations in the future.

著者

Nobuyuki Inamizu

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200317a, (Released:2020-04-12)

参考文献数

13

被引用文献数

1

---

This study shows that it is possible to use position information to estimate the volume of communication in offices to some degree based on (1) office position information from sensing technology and (2) data from daily questionnaires from a survey of 308 employees in a corporate office. The relationship between the office environment and communication has come to the fore in recent years, and the findings of this study suggest how communication within an office can be estimated for a large sample at a low cost.

著者

Nobuo Takahashi

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200227a, (Released:2020-04-04)

参考文献数

67

被引用文献数

3

---

Since the 1990s, simulation and organizational studies have been conducted in Japan. In this paper, we review the simulation and organizational studies in Japan, including the relationships between researchers. The global trend is to cite the results of simulation studies as metaphors. By contrast, in Japan, there are unique research groups which critically examine the existing models, perform simulations, and further test them against survey data. The lessons they learned are: (a) The animation of the simulation results stir the imagination of researchers and business persons. However, (b) if the phenomena indicated by simulation and the reality of parameter values are not supported by the survey data, the implications derived from simulation are no more than a delusion.

著者

Koji Nakano

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0191220a, (Released:2020-03-10)

参考文献数

15

被引用文献数

2

---

This paper reexamines product development in the Japanese electrical industry after WWII from the perspective of strategies for reducing licensing costs. Immediately after the war, Japanese electronics manufacturers raised their own level of technology by introducing technology from abroad. However, in their effort to arrive at corporate policies enabling them to provide products at as low a price as possible, there was a limit to the sheer amount of licensing costs they could bear to carry out licensed production. Japanese electronics manufacturers, in many cases, engaged in cross-licensing based on their own patents in order to offset licensing fees and keep costs down. To further control licensing costs, manufacturers had no choice but to produce products based on licenses already in hand; each electronics manufacturer established a central R&D laboratory. Up until the early 1990s, “Not Invented Here” was a widely adopted philosophy which, as it turns out, was a historically unique approach.

著者

Takashi Bui

出版者

Global Business Research Center

雑誌

Annals of Business Administrative Science (ISSN:13474464)

巻号頁・発行日

pp.0200107a, (Released:2020-02-11)

参考文献数

19

被引用文献数

1

---

Following the example of the United States, Japanese companies have been appointing more independent outside directors in recent years. Independent outside directors are regarded as playing a key role in determining executive compensation and other managerial oversight functions. Prior research mostly supports this idea with respect to U.S. corporations. However, some studies are more skeptical. Therefore, in response to a prior study on U.S. corporations by Chhaochharia and Grinstein (2009), this paper takes a sample of 322 Japanese non-financial corporations in the TOPIX 500 index that met certain criteria and analyzes the effect that having more independent directors has had on executive compensation. However, unlike in prior studies, we did not observe a statistically significant effect. In fact, we saw that executive compensation levels were affected more by the structure of executive remuneration that is determined across a company as a whole than by the composition of its board of directors.