Cultural Effects on Organizational Structure: The Case of Japanese Firms in the United States

This paper reports the findings of a survey of 54 Japanese business organizations in the southern California region. We conceptualize these organizations as hybrids whose strategies of structuring wvork and authority relations incorporate both Western and Japanese patterns. Following Yoshino's treatment of Japanese multinationals, iv'e hypothesize that the extent to which an organization of this sort adopts structural features which are characteristically Japanese depends on the extent to which it recruits Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans as employees. Based on a series of regressions in which the Aston measures of structure are taken as dependent variables and the proportions of employees who are Japanese and Japanese-American are independent variables along with measures of size, automation, function, and status, wve attempt to test this hypothesis. We find relatively strong evidence that functional (i.e., occupational) specialization varies inversely with the size of the Japanese cultural presence. With respect to centralization of decision making, formalization of rules and procedures, and vertical differentiation, only weak and inconclusive tendencies appear in our data.

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