Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan. Edited by Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, Pp. xviii, 410. $74.00.

Abstract

These fascinating essays show why Americanization is both more and less than it seems. On the one hand, the authors argue, the superiority of American production methods remains a widely accepted thesis in the historiography of postwar economic growth. On the other hand, they show that the diffusion of American practices collided at every stage with active efforts by Europeans and Japanese to shape postwar reconstruction according to their own visions. The result was a panoply of hybrid outcomes, rather than any simple process by which superior American models supplanted local practices.