Reversing the Translation Flow: Moving Organizational Practices from Japan to the U.S.

• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Rebecca Piekkari,D. Eleanor Westney
• Date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12435

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

Reversing the Translation Flow: Moving

Organizational Practices from Japan to the U.S.

D. Eleanor Westneya and Rebecca Piekkarib

aYork University; bAalto University

ABST RACT Building on t he neo -institutional organizat ional translation approach and on

interlingua l translation studies, we under take an historical case st udy of the movement of

Japanese organizat ional practices to the USA from the 1970s through the m id-1990s. B ot h

American and Japa nese translators struggled to br ing Japanese management models into the

USA, reversing t he dominant translation f low and bridging wide dif ferences between the

sending and receiv ing contexts. We use the translation ecolog y approach to look at the

interactions over ti me bet ween translators, transl ations, and translation processes st udied

separately in much tra nslation research. Our paper makes t wo contributions to research on

organizat iona l translation. First, it develops more precis e and theoretically-based categori za-

tions of the elements of tran slation ecology – translators, t ranslations, and trans lation pro-

cesses. Second, it chal lenges the generalizabilit y of t he decontext ualization/disembedding and

recontextuali zation/re- embedding processes that are widely a ccepted as a necessary process in

moving management models a nd practices across contexts.

Keywo rds: ecosystems , Japan, management models, organizationa l practices, Scandinavi an

institutionalism, translation, USA

INTRODUCTION

The most extensive East-to-West translation of management models and organ izational

practices in modern times took place from Japan to the United States between the early

1980s and the mid-1990s. This era w itnessed the flow of many management models, not

just one. The Japanese roots of some are well-known, including Theor y Z, kaizen (tr a n s -

lated as continuous improvement), JIT (Just-In-Time production), qual ity circles, and

lean production. For others, the Japanese connections are rarely recognized, including

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:1 January 2020

doi:10. 1111/j om s. 124 35

Address for re prints: D. Eleanor Westney, MIT Sloa n School of Management, Schulic h School of Business,

Organi zation Studies, York Universit y, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON M3J 1P3, Canada (ewestne y@

schulich.yorku.ca).

58 D. E. Westney and R. Piekkar i

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Lt d and Society for the Adva ncement of Management Stud ies

McKinsey’s 7S framework (Pascale a nd At hos, 1981), the concept of the extended enter-

prise (which drew on the Japanese vertical k eiret su model), and the inf luential Prahalad

and Hamel (1990) concept of core competences.

From today’s vantage-point, this wave of models and practices from Japan is part of

the American mainstream of management research and practice. It is all too easy to for-

get the challenges that management experts and practitioners on both sides of the Pacific

faced in the 1970s and 1980s in deciding which Japanese management practices they

should and could move to the United States. Most Americans and Japanese had assumed

unquestioningly, in the three decades after World War II, that profound differences in

culture, social and political systems, and language posed few constraints on Japanese

business learning from American management. However, Americans saw those differ-

ences as much more significant in the reversed situation when Americans were urged

to learn from Japan. This suggests that the challenges of moving management practices

are neither symmetrical nor similar to those arising in the established and most widely

studied translation route from the USA to the rest of the world (see Shenkar, 2001, on

cultural distance).

In this paper, we undertake a historical case study of the movement of Japanese or-

ganizational practices from Japan to the United States from the 1970s through to the

mid-1990s. We anchor our study in the neo-institutional organizational translation ap-

proach (Boxenbaum and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2009; Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996,

2005; Wæraas and Nielsen, 2016; Wedlin and Sahlin, 2017), and build on the concept of

‘translation ecology’ recently proposed by Wedlin and Sahlin (2017) to look at the inter-

actions between translators, translations, and translation processes over time. Although

the translation ecology approach is relatively new and has yet to be applied in empirical

research, it is an innovative concept that is particularly well-suited to examining a wide

flow of translations over time, such as the efforts of the Americans to learn from Japanese

management. We use the term ‘translation ecology’ to refer to the conceptual approach,

and ‘translation ecosystem’ to refer to the empirical phenomenon, and pose the following

research question: How does a translation ecosystem develop around the movement of

management models from a country outside the centre of management knowledge pro-

duction into that centre, when the source society is widely seen as radically ‘other’ and

unfamiliar in terms of culture, language, social structure, and history?

We make two contributions to research on organizational translation. First, we develop

and expand the concept of a translation ecosystem in several ways. We draw attention

to the importance of language in organizational translation, and turn to interlingual

translation studies for concepts and insights into how translators address the challenges

of making materials from a distant and unfamiliar culture accessible and acceptable

for the receivers. We examine the interactions of two sets of translators that have been

studied separately in much translation research: those involved in constructing general

models that are materialized in texts aimed at a wide audience, and those involved in

translating practices into specific organizations, particularly the growing number of

Japanese-owned subsidiaries in the USA. We also introduce the concept of disciplinary

sub-communities that interact in the translation ecosystem. These sub-communities had

their own disciplinary languages (such as organization behaviour) that shaped transla-

tions. Early translations using one disciplinary language influenced later translations in