To what extent are American and Japanese managerial concepts and techniques converging?

This paper explains the effects of the Japanese recession and the accelerated pace of globalisation and technological diffusion on the rationalisation of what were previously held up as the mainstays of Japanese management. These are the key questions: What caused the failure of the superior Japanese industrial agenda that was guided by the much-lauded Japanese management models of the 1980s? What are the managerial values, concepts, and norms that enabled the U.S. economy to move expeditiously toward reforms and inhibited the Japanese from doing the same? Finally, which managerial values, concepts and norms are culturally determined, which are financially determined, or both, or are they a mix, and if so, how has this mix changed over time? The paper concludes with a reexamination of notions of Japanese and/or American cultural dominance as they express themselves in theories of management, drawing conclusions about the erosion of nationally distinct management practices in the face of a globalisation.