"Toyota Motor Manufacturing Australia in 1995: An Emergent Global Strategy"

This paper describes the recent developments of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Australia(TMCA), re-interpreting its pattern of competitive activities as an emergent global strategy. By emergent global strategy the author means a pattern of strategic activities that does not necessarily follow a manufacturer's ex-ante "grand design" for globalization. TMCA has indeed strengthened its own competitive capabilities and expanded a multi-layered international network of resource-knowledge transfers among Toyota's overseas and domestic facilities in recent years, but such capabilities and networks were created through the company's continuous efforts to adapt its manufacturing systems to the rapidly changing markets, competition, and government policies in Australia. Through this analysis, the paper emphasizes that a manufacturing firm's globalization strategy does not always have to be based on deliberate top-down planning --- it can also be a result of the path-dependent process of system emergence, or firm's struggle for survival.