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The purpose of this article is to highlight the role that Izzat played in the unfolding industrial disputation that emerged at the Toyota plant in Bangalore between 1999 and 2007. Isolated instances contributed to a build-up of employee and community resentment at what was perceived as an attack on Izzat. Behind the events is the attempt to transpose Japanese “lean production and management systems” into an Indian subsidiary where local industrial and cultural conditions were not suitable for the imposition of such practices from headquarters to a subsidiary. The result of the analysis contributes to the understanding of workplace industrial relations (IR) in India and the centrality of Izzat. Within India, the significance of trade unions; the respect of employees; the importance of family and community; the importance of seniority; and the role of respect and honour are factors that multinationals often fail to understand in the design and implementation of their production and HRM systems. The study contributes to the debate over the transferability of standardized HRM policies and practices. MNEs should play a proactive role in supporting the employees of subsidiaries to adjust to and accommodate new paradigms in workplace industrial relations. The aggressive production and HRM practices at the Toyota plant were not compatible with the norms and cultural institutions of the Indian workforce. One of the key implications of this research is that foreign production, organizational and industrial relations systems and practices cannot be transplanted into host-country environments without the due recognition of key cultural conditions, notably Izzat in India.
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This paper engages with the varieties of capitalism literature to investigate the employee representation and consultation approaches of liberal market economy multinational companies (MNCs), specifically Australian, British and US MNCs operating in Australia. While the literature would suggest commonality amongst these MNCs, the paper considers whether the evidence points to similarity or variation amongst liberal market headquartered MNCs. The findings contribute to filling a recognized empirical gap on MNC employment relations practice in Australia and to a better understanding of within category varieties of capitalism similarity and variation. Drawing on survey data from MNCs operating in Australia, the results demonstrated that UK-owned MNCs were the least likely to report collective structures of employee representation. Moreover, it was found that Australian MNCs were the most likely to engage in collective forms of employee representation and made less use of direct consultative mechanisms relative to their British and US counterparts. In spite of the concerted individualization of the employment relations domain over previous decades, Australian MNCs appear to have upheld more long-standing national institutional arrangements with respect to engaging with employees on a collective basis. This varies from British and US MNC approaches which denotes that our results display within category deviation in the variety of capitalism liberal market economy typology. Just as Hall and Soskice described their seminal work on liberal market economy (LME) and coordinated market economy (CME) categories as a “work-in-progress” (2001: 2), we too suggest that Australia’s evolution in the LME category, and more specifically its industrial relations system development, and the consequences for employment relations practices of its domestic MNCs, may be a work-in-progress.
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This paper compares Japanese and US multinational corporations (MNCs) on their deployment of human resource management (HRM) and employment relations (ER) practices within four countries. Debate about convergence is used to reconcile findings. The context is the shift from the dominance of the Japanese economy in the 1980s and early 1990s towards the renewed dominance of the US economy in more recent decades. We draw on data from representative, parallel surveys of MNCs operating in Canada, the UK, Spain and Australia to test a set of hypotheses examining similarities and differences between subsidiaries of Japanese and US MNCs in relation to management control across borders, remuneration, representation and worker involvement. The findings demonstrate that, despite the pressures of globalization, and the partial movement away from traditional Japanese management practices in Japan, there are clear country of origin effects for Japanese and American MNCs. Results indicate that Japanese and US MNCs behave differently in terms of the control that they exercise, with Japanese firms exhibiting a greater tendency to use personal forms of control in their foreign subsidiaries and a lower tendency to use procedural forms of control. In terms of HRM practices, Japanese MNCs are distinctive in relation to pay systems. For example, they are less likely than their US counterparts to use performance-related pay and, more likely, to adopt non-union representative structures in subsidiaries. In line with Kaufman (2016), we argue that the study’s findings provide evidence for the ‘converging divergence phenomenon’ in that both Japanese and US MNCs are adopting the most universal aspects of each other’s management practices and integrating them into their own unique systems of management in response to global market forces. We discuss the theoretical implications for the convergence and divergence of HRM and ER systems, and the development of such systems in Japanese and US MNC subsidiaries.
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- Journal Article (3)