Customer Reviews

Strategic Networks: The Art of Japanese Interfirm Cooperation

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The book is particularly strong in analyzing the attitudes of knowledge creation of Japanese firms. Still, the book is of greater use for academics than the general reader.

This forthcoming book by Frank-Jurgen Richter deals with an important issue-commercial and technological cooperation among industrial firms within "strategic networks"-that should be of interest to numerous business scholars in such fields as industrial organization, technological innovation, marketing and purchasing, strategic management, and international business. Despite a fairly large number of network-oriented business studies published in recent years there is still a need for good network studies that contribute to increase our understanding of industrial development processes and, in particular, how companies can strengthen their competitiveness through interaction/networking with other firms.

The author has chosen the Japanese industrial setting as his study object. This was a good choice since there is much to be learnt from the Japanese way of networking. The fact that Japan during the 1990s has lost some of its previous competitive power does not decrease the relevance of studying Japan. By contrast, the Japanese networks are now in a transition stage, partly as a response to the economic recession, and this provides an excellent opportunity to investigate how strategic networks evolve. Thanks to its focus on the dynamic aspects of networks (rather than their structure), the book gives a valuable contribution to our knowledge of business networks.

The main strength of the book is that it in a unique way contributes to deepen our knowledge about business networking in general and Japanese networks in particular. A weakness of the book, in my opinion, is that it introduces so many different theoretical approaches and concepts. It makes it a little bit "heavy" to read. According to the author this is necessary in order to reach a satisfactory explanation of the structure and dynamics of strategic networks. This might be true, but I am not fully convinced that the use of all these theories was absolutely necessary in order for the author to make his point. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend the book to those readers who are interested in the topic

Pre-release review...

This book is exciting to read, coming as it does in the wake of the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy and the Asian monetary crisis. What looked to be invincible massive corporations now seem to be mere edifices once supported by nepotism and unsecured bank loans. Richter draws on his broad experience to take the reader easily through a mass of detail with well argued text - some arranged in a tidy academic fashion being well referenced, and some clearly derived from personal knowledge. All in all it builds up to an impressive document, which, far from boring the reader continues to offer insights in the operations of the Japanese firm - such as their willingness to de-staff and indeed de-skill at the shop floor level by using more and more robots for repetitive tasks; but where intelligence is needed, they maintain a surplus of personnel able to filter and channel an enormous volume of data. Organisational slack is seen to be placed where it can be effective, and this applies also to their use of networks exploited for the strategic benefit of the co-operating organisations.

Inevitably, in this day and age, Richter grapples with the development of Organisational Learning and the management of Knowledge Creation in the context of firms networking for their joint advantage. Herein he notes historical antecedents from the Edo and Mieji-times, but this is just to place certain modern case studies into a robust context, leading the reader into an understanding of the need for organisational boundaries to be permeable in order that synergies can take place. Thus he comes to the acknowledgement that the visions of senior management can act at once as goals, and also as the catalyst for individuals to unfold goal-oriented tasks - essentially these chief executives have to be both anarchists and organisers within a network setting where other like-minded persons co-operate trustingly.

Recommended!

As Michael Porter shows with the terms like value chain, cluster, the firm can't live on its own. It's in the environment consisting of other firms which compete and cooperate to each other to survive and manage uncertainties coming from competition. In the era of globalization, uncertainties from competition have been intensified to the unprecedented level. So the interfirm cooperation to manage uncertainties has become ever more critic. Keiretzu system or cluster like Silicon Valley is typical example of interfirm cooperation. Such a form of cooperation is called as the interfirm network. But unlike Silicon Valley, Japanese network system, keiretzu, is much more formally organized enough to be presented as a model. The aim of this book is not to dissect the keiretzu (such books are already abundant), but to offer conceptual tools to see through interfirm cooperation. The author mobilize various aspects and cases from Japanese business. But those are no more than real life examples. The focus lies in developing abstract enough tools to be applied to everywhere. In so doing, the author put extant concepts to use, mainly from organizational learning theory, systems theory. Author's picture is vivid, convincing, and effective.