Kaizen, Ethics and care of the operations;

Management after Empowerment

1. Citation of the Article

Author: Alexander Styhre
(Chalmers University of Technology Gothenburg)
Published in: Journal of Management studies 38:6
Published on: September 2001
Volume No. 0022-2380

2. Why I have selected this article

I have selected this particular article because I am interested to learn more about
“Kaizen”. It is one of the hot topics in the field of Total Quality Management so being a
student of total quality management it is greatest desire of mine to learn more about this
practice. It is also important for somebody who is just beginning to learn TQM to
understand the concept of kaizen in detail as it refers to small incremental changes and it
doesn’t require any rocket science to understand it. Kaizen is most easy to understand and
implement and it is a useful practice to eliminate wastes from your process and increase
productivity of the firm. The topic of kaizen also interests me because I have earlier
attended a one day workshop on “5S Kaizen management rules” which was organized by
National Productivity Organization, that also created a lot of interest in me learn more
about kaizen.

3. Scope of the Article

I view this article “Kaizen, Ethics and care of the operations; Management after
Empowerment” in a broader sense. Because kaizen is a management practice which is
most widely used and it is known that Japanese have developed this technique but in this
article it is quite interesting to know that Swedish companies are claiming that it belongs
to Sweden. It is also a unique topic in itself as author is comparing kaizen, Ethics and
care of operations with management and empowerment. So that is why it must be viewed
in broader sense as in traditional Pakistani organizations we are not relating kaizen and
some other TQM practices with ethics.

4. Methodology and Model used in the article

Methodology of the article is such that data has been collected from various
sources by conducting interviews of support staff, union representatives, blue-collar
workers, white-collar workers and top management of three Swedish companies.
Approximately 70 hours semi structured interview material was gathered. In this article
Kaizen is used as a model to make improvements in the operations of the companies.
5. Review of the Article
This article is written by Alexander Styhre and it was published in the journal of
management studies in September 2001. In this article author has explained the different
notions of Kaizen in comparison with Japanese and Swedish companies. The article starts
with explaining the vague concept of empowerment as the effects of empowerment in
day-to-day practices needs to be studied. It is argued by author in this article that in both
Sweden and in Japan, kaizen represents a regime which rests upon ethics rather than the
empowerment.
While describing the concept of kaizen author states the condition of Japanese
companies as mentioned in English language literature as deviant case and merely slow
in converging on western practices. In 1986, Maasaki Imai published “Kaizen: The key to
Japan’s competitive success”. In this book Imai claims that the ability to motivate
employees to undertake small, incremental improvements to shop-floor constitutes the
bed rock of Japanese manufacturing excellence. The idea of kaizen is simple: all
employees in an organization have the capability and willingness to contribute to the
continuous refinement and betterment of existing activities. In practice this implies that
each work teams arranges meetings once in a week at which potential improvements are
discussed and where possible solutions to problems are presented. The work team has the
responsibility of implementing suggestions from its members. The day-to-day work of
kaizen includes a number of heuristics such as diagrams, statistical tools and analysis
models.
In this paper use of kaizen in three Swedish manufacturing companies is
presented. The study was conducted to illustrate how the notion of ethics can be
distinguished from empowerment and the benefits with a theoretical model based on
ethics. In the three companies, top management, white collar workers, blue collar
workers, support staff and union representatives were interviewed. Two companies serve
as suppliers within the automobile industry and one company serves within the food
industry. The empirical material was structured in such a way that it evolved around three
dominating themes. Firstly kaizen was thought of in terms of representing a departure
from Taylorism and scientific management principles for the administration of shop-floor
activities. Secondly kaizen was claimed to represent a set of ideas, methods and
techniques that were in harmony with what inter-locuters referred to, and thought of as a
specific Scandinavian management tradition. Thirdly kaizen was argued to be a means of
emancipating the individual human being-the worker using kaizen-from various restraints
and externally imposed routines.
When we study this article we can find comparison of kaizen and Taylorism and
scientific management which is the first theme of this article. In the Taylorism it was
claimed by companies this Taylor approach showed distrust, tight control and
opportunistic behavior thrived and were conceived of as being unreflected component of
everyday life. And blue collar workers were not expected to invest much of there
intellectual capacity in there work. When kaizen was put into use, on the other hand
mutual trust, consent and the use of individual creativities became virtues widely
acknowledged through out the company. Thus kaizen brings to the company a completely
new set of ideas, world-views, ethics and objectives from which a whole new perspective
on factory work derives.
 The second theme of the article is about kaizen and Scandinavian management. In
this regard Japanese companies were stereo-typed by the Swedish companies as the one
which are conceived as egalitarian, highly demanding as regards work load and above all
very different to Swedish companies. Where as Swedish companies are thought to rest
upon the ability and will of employees to contribute to the company as individual,
creative beings rather than some kind of “Human Robots” as in the case of Japanese
companies which is stated in this article. The companies claim that they don’t find any
difficulty in implementing kaizen because they feel that kaizen was part of there
Scandinavian management in harmony present in their history but conceive it as
management practice either lost by them or not used currently by Swedish companies.
The third theme of this article is kaizen and emancipation. Emancipation here
refers to potential and abilities of the individual to unfetter himself from external
restraints and use this newly gained freedom to himself in desirable ways. Among
companies, some of them were of the view that kaizen is used to represent management
regime and reject Taylorism in harmony with Scandinavian management and leadership
style.
At the end author describes kaizen as an ethic in Japan and Sweden. This is the
most interesting part of the article because here author is showing some discrimination
and some disrespect for Japanese companies. The author argues that kaizen as an ethic
can be separated in three major operations. First, kaizen is separated diachronically
through detaching it from scientific management. Second, kaizen is separated culturally
from ‘other’ that is Japanese companies and Japanese workers, thereby inscribing kaizen
with Swedish genealogy. Third kaizen is separated to the collective and reduced to the
level to the level of the individual. So as a result kaizen is no longer a Japanese,
Tayloristic, collective practice rather a Swedish non-Tayloristic, individual-oriented
business technique.
At the end author has concluded that his research was conducted to examine the
transfer of kaizen from Japanese companies to Swedish manufacturing businesses. Rather
than seeing kaizen as being based empowerment, the distribution and allocation of
various resources within the organization, the use of kaizen is based on ethics.

6. Critical Analysis
After studying this article I found some of the weaknesses in this article which are
stated below.
1. The research is quantitative based which does not attract its readers as there
are no figures available to show exactly how many interviews were
conducted, what was the response rate, how many respondents disagree with
the notion of kaizen as Swedish based management technique etc.
2. Most of the data included in this article is used only to prove that kaizen
belongs to Sweden but the real strength of the article was its title which stated
“Kaizen, Ethics and care of the operations; Management after Empowerment”
but there was less emphasis shown to prove the relationship between kaizen
and ethics. So more research is required in this regard to prove this
relationship.
3. This article is more a war of words to prove that kaizen belongs to
Scandinavian management and in this regard less respect is shown for the
Japanese companies.

7. Other Publications of the Author

About the author he is professor in the following university

Chalmers University of Technology

Department of Technology Management and Economics
Division of Project Management
Chalmers University of Technology
Vera Sandbergs Allé 8, Vasa Hus 2
SE-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden

Tel: +46 (0)31 772 44 28

Fax: +46 (0)31 20 91 40
E-mail: alexander.styhre@chalmers.se

Following are some the other publications of author of this article.

1. Alexander Styhre, Mats Sundgren: Creativity as connectivity: a rhizome model of
creativity. International Journal of Internet and Enterprise Management 1(4):
(2003)
2. Bureaucracy in an age of fluidity (2007, Routledge).
3. Intersektionalitet och organisation (Liber, 2007. Co-authored with Ulla Ericsson-
Zetterquist).
4. Managing organization creativity: Critique and practices (2005, Palgrave. Co-
authored with Mats Sundgren)
5. Management writing out of bounds: Writing after post colonialism (2005, Liber
& Copenhagen Business School Press)

8. References used in this article

Following are only some of the references used in this article.

1. Alvesson, M. (1996) communication, power and organization. Berlin: De Gruyter
2. Anderson, J. C., Rungtasanatham, M. Schroeder, R. G. (1994). ‘A theory of
quality management underlying Deming management method’ Academy of
Management Review 19, 3, 472-509.
3. Berggren, C. (1994) ‘NUMMI vs. Uddevalla’ Sloan Management Review, 36, 37-
49.
4. Berggren, C. (1995) ‘Japan as number two: competitive problems and the future
of alliance after the burst of bubble room’. Work Employment & Society, 9, 1, 53-
95.
5. Boje, D. M., Gephart, R. P. and Thatchenkery, T. J. (Eds) (1996) Postmodern
Management and organization Theory London: Sage.