Recent years have seen intense debates among management and academics on the rise of `lean production' and `Japanization'. This book examines in detail the actual practice of transfer and adaptation of productive models into the auto industry. Case studies cover in detail the Japanese transplant experience in North America, and the global experience of hybrid production systems in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

After the Second World War, the economics of the western capitalist countries were based on a production system called fordism, but in the mid 1970s this system began to break down, and it has been in crisis since. But does resolving this crisis imply a complete break with the past, notably with the principles of Taylor and Ford?;Based on an analysis of the transformations currently taking place in several international companies, this book reveals the complexities and subtleties of today's transitions.

This book is the English language translation of the French publication E conomie Politique des Capitalismes. Research in this book presents institutional and historical macroeconomics, through an analysis of wage-labour nexus, innovation systems, monetary and financial systems, integration into the world economy, formation of economic policy configurations, and the history of economic theories. In doing so, the book addresses how and why economic regularities change in long run, and why do macroeconomic adjustments differ across countries within the same historical period. It shows how institutional changes that have occurred since the 1970s and the research on the transformation of the American and French capitalism, have led to the emergence of a research agenda, known as Regulation Theory. Readers would understand the permanent transformations of capitalism and its crises, given the book's inclusion of long-term historical studies, systematic international comparisons for the contemporary period, and the exploration of the institutional and social foundations of microeconomics which has led to the evolution of various brands of capitalism. This translated work includes a Foreword by Associate Professor Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux and Professor Thomas Lamarche.

Until recently most observers were of the opinion that firms had to adopt a Japanese model of management or perish. They overlooked the fact that there are a number of efficient productive models and that there is no single 'best way'. This book shows the diversity of productive models and discusses the optimum macro and micro economic and social conditions that a firm needs to stay profitable. In conclusion the authors suggest an analytical framework of profitability conditions, easily accessible to practitioners, academics and students.

The contributors to Japanese Capitalism in Crisis show that there can be a middle ground between the current extremes of the Japanese economy, and offer two proposals: a deeper understanding of long term development, and an extension of existing theory.

Among a vast literature on the Asian economies, the book proposes a distinctive approach, inspired by Regulation Theory, in order to understand the current transformations of the Asian economies. The book follows their transformations after the 1997 Asian crisis until the subprime crisis. During this period, the viability of their growth regime was to coherence of five basic institutional forms: the degree of competition and insertion into the world economy, the nature of labour market organization, the monetary and exchange rate regimes and finally the style for State intervention via legislation, public spending and tax. The book provides new findings. The degree of financial liberalization and opening to the world economy largely determines the severity of the 2008-2009 recession and the political-economic reactions of each Asian countries to the subprime crisis. Asian capitalisms are distinct from American and European ones, but they are quite diverse among themselves, and this differentiation has been widening during the last decade. This book will help to shed light on a de facto regional economic integration is taking place in Asia, but unsolved past political conflicts do hinder the institutionalisation of these interdependencies.

This book argues that there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the "ideal and universal" arrangement for coordinating economic activity. Instead, the editors argue, the economic institutions of capitalism exhibit a large variety of objectives and tools that complement each other and cannot work in isolation. The various chapters of the book explore challenging issues in the analysis of differing institutional arrangements for coordinating economic activity, asking what logics and functions they follow and why they emerge, mature and persist in the forms they do. They conclude that any institutional arrangement has its strengths and weaknesses and that such institutions evolve according to a logic specific to each society. They also note that institutions continuously respond to changing circumstances, and are not static entities.

Robert Boyer and Yves Sailard's Theorie de la Regulation introduces the Francophone public to one of the most important new currents in social science of the past half-century. This long-awaited translation will help broaden its impact still further.
Regulation Theory focuses on the structural features of a given model and has helped enliven the examination of core economic concepts.

Robert Boyer and Yves Sailard's Theorie de la Regulation introduced the Francophone public to one of the most important new currents in social science of the past half-century. This long-awaited translation will help broaden its impact still further.
Regulation Theory focuses on the structural features of a given model and has helped enliven the examination of core economic concepts.

Contents:
Introduction: a puzzle for economic theories Robert Boyer and Toshio Yamada
Part I Institutional interpretations and theories
1. Japanese capitalism and the companyist compromise Toshio Yamada
2. The hierarchical market-firm nexus as the Japanese mode of régulation Akinori Isogai, Akira Ebizuka and Hiroyasu Uemura
3. Disproportionate productivity growth and accumulation regimes Hiroyuki Uni
Part II The wage labour nexus, forms of competition, financial regime: major structural transformations
4. The capital-labour compromise and the financial system: a changing hierarchy Hironori Tohyama
5. 'Industrial welfare' and 'company-ist' régulation: an eroding complementarity Masanori Hanada and Yasuro Hirano
6. The financial mode of régulation in Japan and its demise Naoki Nabeshima
Part III What crisis and what futures?
7. The wage labour nexus challenged: more the consequence than the cause of the crisis Robert Boyer and Michel Juillard
8. Growth, distribution and structural change in the post-war Japanese economy Hiroyasu Uemura
9. Beyond the East Asian economic crisis Yasuo Inoue
10. Some limitations on Japanese competitiveness enjamin Coriat, Patrice Geoffron and Marianne Rubenstein
Conclusion: an epochal change ... but uncertian future Robert Boyer and Toshio Yamada

This text challenges the popular view that globalization threatens the nation-state in determining national policy. It examines the fundamental issue of competitiveness and market power in an increasingly borderless and co-dependent world. Despite this increased threat to the nation-state as an effective manager of the national economy, the authors argue that there are a number of options and alternatives open to governments to protect themselves from the global business cycle.

This work challenges the popular view that globalization threatens the role of the nation-state in determining national policy. It examines the fundamental issue of competitiveness and market power in an increasingly borderless and co-dependent world. Despite this increased threat to the nation-state as an effective manager of the national economy, the authors argue that there are a number of options and alternatives open to governments to protect themselves from the global business cycle.

Among a vast literature on the Asian economies, the book proposes a distinctive approach, inspired by Regulation Theory, in order to understand the current transformations of the Asian economies. The book follows their transformations after the 1997 Asian crisis until the subprime crisis. During this period, the viability of their growth regime was to coherence of five basic institutional forms: the degree of competition and insertion into the world economy, the nature of labour market organization, the monetary and exchange rate regimes and finally the style for State intervention via legislation, public spending and tax. The book provides new findings. The degree of financial liberalization and opening to the world economy largely determines the severity of the 2008-2009 recession and the political-economic reactions of each Asian countries to the subprime crisis. Asian capitalisms are distinct from American and European ones, but they are quite diverse among themselves, and this differentiation has been widening during the last decade. This book will help to shed light on a de facto regional economic integration is taking place in Asia, but unsolved past political conflicts do hinder the institutionalisation of these interdependencies.

This book integrates three levels of political-economic analysis: first a comparative institutional analysis of the varieties of capitalism in both Europe and Asia, second a macroeconomic analysis of industrial structural change and economic dynamics of the national economies in Europe and Asia, and then an encompassing analysis of international production linkages and international financial instability which determine the long-term patterns of regional integration in Europe and Asia. The comparison of the European Union and ASEAN delivers some key conditions for a viable long-term regional economic integration to cope with contrasted capitalisms and growth regimes: either pragmatism in the choice of an exchange rate regime, or a form of fiscal federalism. The reader will also find a genuine analysis of the dynamism of the Chinese economy, a study on institutional changes and de-industrialization in Japan, and the increasing international production linkages among China, Japan, Korea, and ASEAN. It is shown how the enlargement of the European Union and the Euro triggered the diverging competitiveness and macroeconomic performances that led to the crisis of a six decades long economic and political process. This book is the result of long lasting Asian-European collaborative research. It is a milestone in the historical and comparative analysis along the regulation theory that aims at understanding the long-run transformations, renewed diversity and interdependence of capitalisms.

Fiction. These astonishing stories, which range in setting from Palm Beach to Paris to poet Robert Lowell's New York City hotel room, trace the designs and delusions of people at turning points and souls in turmoil. Robert Boyers is Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore College and editor of Salmagundi. He is the author of seven books, including Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945. He also won the Cooper Prize for the best short story of the year, 2003. Recent stories have appeared in The Yale Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Working deliberately against the grain of assumptions dominant in the contemporary literary academy, Boyers examines novels by Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera and others, arguing that it is necessary to speak of character, ethics, and philosophic purpose if one is to understand these works. A penetrating study, Atrocity and Amnesia illuminates some of the major fiction of our time and makes an important contribution to contemporary political thought.

This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status--Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term "intellectual," whose famous 1965 essay "Notes on Camp" won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at The New Yorker. To know Sontag and Steiner, as this memoir suggests, was often to feel overmatched and yet also bemused and awe-struck. Both of them gave off an air of omniscience and self-confidence, as if they had taken to heart the words of the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote, "I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me." Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions--the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others.

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.

This book integrates three levels of political-economic analysis: first a comparative institutional analysis of the varieties of capitalism in both Europe and Asia, second a macroeconomic analysis of industrial structural change and economic dynamics of the national economies in Europe and Asia, and then an encompassing analysis of international production linkages and international financial instability which determine the long-term patterns of regional integration in Europe and Asia. The comparison of the European Union and ASEAN delivers some key conditions for a viable long-term regional economic integration to cope with contrasted capitalisms and growth regimes: either pragmatism in the choice of an exchange rate regime, or a form of fiscal federalism. The reader will also find a genuine analysis of the dynamism of the Chinese economy, a study on institutional changes and de-industrialization in Japan, and the increasing international production linkages among China, Japan, Korea, and ASEAN. It is shown how the enlargement of the European Union and the Euro triggered the diverging competitiveness and macroeconomic performances that led to the crisis of a six decades long economic and political process. This book is the result of long lasting Asian-European collaborative research. It is a milestone in the historical and comparative analysis along the regulation theory that aims at understanding the long-run transformations, renewed diversity and interdependence of capitalisms.

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.

As you approach someone, you first encounter outer body language, facial expressions, speech styles, emotional behavior, and then deeper inner levels of thinking and feeling to the deepest level of self and soul. This practical guide relates these levels to specific skills in a unique system of communication. The skills are refined through appreciating the subtle flow of energy that integrates heart and mind, unity and diversity, in 36 specific skills to increase assertive balance and reduce unbalanced non-assertiveness and aggression. The book's unique features include its comprehensiveness and progressive refinement of deeper levels in a coherent communication system. The format of the book is also unique. Emphasizing simplicity and clarity, each skill is described in a brief four-page chapter that includes a definition, how to use the skill, and realistic examples of ineffective and effective uses-capped by brief summaries, Putting It All Together, that cumulatively organize the skills into a concise, easy to use, deeply integrative approach to healthy, effective communication.

This book argues that there is no single best institutional arrangement for organizing modern societies. Therefore, the market should not be considered the ideal and universal arrangement for coordinating economic activity. Instead, the editors argue, the economic institutions of capitalism exhibit a large variety of objectives and tools that complement each other and can not work in isolation. The various chapters of the book ask what logics and functions institutions follow and why they emerge, mature and persist in the forms they do.