Managerial Careers And Management Development: a Comparative Analysis of Britain And Japan

Abstract

Two topics that have become near obsessions in the personnel field are management development and the ‘Japanese model’. Current debates on the former have been reviewed elsewhere, while there are numerous surveys of the latter. Some studies have also set the Japanese system of training and development alongside that of Britain and other countries. What has been lacking is a directly comparative study looking at the experience of managers in the two countries. Such a study needs to address two of the key limitations in the extant literature. First, there has been a failure to take account of context: innovations in management development have been described with little consideration of how far their operation depends on the context of the organisation in which they are introduced. Second, there is evidently great variation between organisations, but the pattern of this variation, still less the reasons for it, has been largely neglected.